The role of conflicts in the learning process

Abstract

Tutoring strategies have evolved from direct learning to cooperative learning involving various agents, which are either computer simulated or real human beings. During these learning sessions conflicts then arise since the student must interact with several simulated participants such as the tutor, the companion, or the troublemaker (a companion able to mislead the learner). We call these conflicts external conflicts. Some of them are accidental but others are intentional in order to test the learner's self-confidence and to detect internal conflicts that oppose new knowledge to existing learner knowledge. In this article, we highlight the usefulness of conflicts in various cooperative learning strategies, showing that they contribute with social interaction to the development of cognition. In particular, we discuss the advantage of an intentional external conflict caused by a difference of opinion between the student and the troublemaker. This difference of opinion is introduced in order to get the student to evaluate his own opinion and cognitive schema. If the learner presents a cognitive dissonance (discord between ideas) a dialogue with the troublemaker will help him correct his internal conflicts. Then, the tutor and the troublemaker cooperate to manage a learning session. We present experimental results that show the gain brought by the troublemaker conflicts in learning improvement.