Betty's Brain

Betty's Brain is a software environment created at Vanderbilt University by TAG (the Teachable Agents Group) to help promote students' understanding of metacognitive skills and to reinforce river ecosystem knowledge as part of a science curriculum.

The system specifically focuses on reinforcing so called Self-Regulatory skills that promote both Self-Monitoring and Self-Assessment as one might expect of an independent learner.

The system focuses around a main character Betty, who has asked the students to teach her about river ecosystems. In this way Betty's Brain diverges from a classic ITS (Instructional Tutoring System) and adopts the LBT (Learning by Teaching) paradigm where computer agent interactions are focused around completing a primary task unrelated to the acquisition of domain content knowledge.

More recently, Betty's level of artificial intelligence has been largely modified to increase the interactivity with the students. Betty's task is to interact with students as a "good" learner, one who has self-regulatory skills, might. By incorporating feedback related to these self-regulatory skills we have shown that students are better able to perform in future learning tasks.

Current studies are focused on the 5th grade classroom with approximately 100 students. As well, as of July 2007, the system is being developed to integrate directly into classroom curriculum for the coming semester with included tools such as Front of the Class Betty, developed at Stanford University.