Sidekick: A Tool for Helping Students Manage Behavior in Self-initiated Learning Scenarios

Students engage in many learning activities outside of class but, it is not easy for them to learn on their own because they also need to identify what activities to perform, decide how long to engage in them, evaluate their progress, shift to other activities if needed and avoid distractions aside from others. This research designed and implemented a learning support tool called Sidekick, which used a retrospective approach to help students analyze and evaluate their own behavior so they can adjust it accordingly. The results showed that students benefitted from understanding their behavior more. It also showed how students' learning behavior changed over time and the differences in the type and amount of change between learning sessions according to students' level of autonomy. Less autonomous students seemed to improve less compared to highly autonomous students however, the system was able to encourage them to recall and self-evaluate which they might not have done without the system.