Student motivation is a critical factor during collaboration because the social and environmental factors within the collaborative context may influence participation. We used students' self-reported motivational values to provide collaborative support in a cross-platform learning environment. The support used a combination of displaying prompts to facilitate digital collaboration and rewarding badges to reinforce positive aspects of student participation. A classroom study (n=52) was conducted to examine the effect of this support on participation and learning. We discuss the implications of collaborative support using the data collected from multiple digital collaborative activities.

Research has shown study habits and skills to be correlated with academic success, calling for a deeper comprehension of these behaviors and processes to design effective interventions for struggling students. Chatbots have recently been used as a persuasive technology to help support behavioral change, making them an intriguing design space for students' study habits and skills. This paper investigated the feasibility of using chatbots for promoting behavioral change of college students majoring in Computer Science (CS). We conducted semi-structured interviews with CS peer-tutors and surveyed university freshmen to understand students' study habits and identify technical intervention opportunities. Inspired by the findings, we designed StudyBuddy, a chatbot prototype deployed in Slack that periodically sends tips, provides assessments of students' study habits via surveys, helps the students break down assignments, recommends academic resources, and sends reminders. We evaluated the usability of the prototype in-depth with 8 students (both first-year and senior students) and 5 course instructors followed by a large scale evaluative survey (n=117) using video of the prototype. Our research identified important design challenges such as building trust and preserving privacy, limiting interaction costs, and supporting both immediate and long-term sustainable support. Likewise, we proposed design recommendations that demonstrate context awareness, personalize the experience based on user preferences, and adapt over time as students mature and grow.