CharacterCritique: Supporting Children's Development of Critical Thinking through Multi-Agent Interaction in Story ReadingShow others and affiliations
Number of Authors: 112025 (English)In: CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery , 2025, article id 131Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Critical thinking plays a crucial role in children's education for fostering cognitive development, cultivating independent thinking habits, and enhancing their ability to problem-solving. However, the current educational model places greater emphasis on children's understanding of factual knowledge, with relatively less focus on developing critical thinking skills. We present CharacterCritique to support children's critical thinking based on the theory of inquiry dialogue. This tool uses an analytical story as the medium, it encourages dialogue between parents, children, and story characters. Through this process, children continuously engage in interpretation, analysis, explanation, evaluation, and regulation, all of which promote critical thinking and decision-making. Such interaction is supported by multiple agents. In our between-subjects study (n=32), we compared CharacterCritique to traditional storybook reading. The results show that CharacterCritique is more effective at sparking children's interest in deeper discussions. It also better fosters critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and creates more opportunities for parent-child dialogue.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery , 2025. article id 131
Keywords [en]
Children, Critical thinking, family, Human-AI Interaction, multi-agent system, Story
National Category
Other Computer and Information Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-244013DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713602Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105005732250ISBN: 9798400713941 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-244013DiVA, id: diva2:1966571
Conference
CHI 2025: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan, 26 April 2025- 1 May, 2025
2025-06-102025-06-102025-06-10Bibliographically approved