Investigating the differences in effects of the persuasive message’s timing during science learning to overcome the cognitive dissonance

Based on conceptual change theory, cognitive dissonance is known as an important factor in conceptual change. Thus, those who design and build educational robots will need to understand how best to provide ways for robots to implicitly persuade students to change their bad attitudes when encountering a cognitively dissonant situation. Building on diverse literature, we examine how to make students change their bad attitudes of avoiding difficult science exercises. More precisely, we intend to make students overcome cognitive dissonance by choosing to redo a difficult science exercise that they had previously answered incorrectly rather than jumping to another exercise. First, we introduce the concept of gamma window. Then we investigate how different timings of the persuasive strategy affect how students overcome the cognitive dissonance and avoid learned helplessness.