Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216

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Computers in Human Behavior

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh

Learning with personalized recommender systems: A psychological view

Jrgen Buder , Christina Schwind
Knowledge Media Research Center, Konrad-Adenauer-Str. 40, 72072 Tbingen, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper explores the potentials of recommender systems for learning from a psychological point of
Available online 29 September 2011 view. It is argued that main features of recommender systems (collective responsibility, collective
intelligence, user control, guidance, personalization) t very well to principles in the learning sciences.
Keywords: However, recommender systems should not be transferred from commercial to educational contexts
Recommender systems on a one-to-one basis, but rather need adaptations in order to facilitate learning. Potential adaptations
Learning are discussed both with regard to learners as recipients of information and learners as producers of data.
Moreover, it is distinguished between system-centered adaptations that enable proper functioning in
educational contexts, and social adaptations that address typical information processing biases. Implica-
tions for the design of educational recommender systems and for research on educational recommender
systems are discussed.
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction unrated items can be predicted. A common method to predict pref-

When we ponder over the movie that we would like to see next
weekend, or whether the new restaurant in town is worth checking
out, we often rely on the experience and recommendations of
friends and other people who we trust to be knowledgeable about
our tastes and preferences. Getting good recommendations be-
comes an important issue when the number of viable options is
too large to be perused by an individual person. Internet servers
provide access to vast amounts of information, and consequently,
offering recommendations is one of the most pressing problems
for the design of electronic environments. It can be said that search
engines provide recommendations, as a list of search results is or-
dered through link analysis algorithms that show most linked-to,
and thereby most relevant Web pages on top (Brin & Page, 1998).
Similarly, a bestseller list on a commercial Website can be regarded
as providing recommendations. However, in these cases the rec-
ommendations are generic, i.e. different users receive the same
or highly similar output. In contrast, personalized recommender
systems try to achieve the gold standard of recommendations in
real life by mimicking a person who is not only very knowledge-
able about a topic, but also takes the individual tastes and prefer-
ences of users into account.
Personalized recommender systems capture the traces that
users leave in an environment, either through page visits or expli-
cit ratings of items, and they are based on the assumption that
page visits or high ratings are indicative of user preferences. From
data about visited or rated items, preferences on not-visited or
Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 7071 979 326; fax: +49 7071 979 100.
E-mail addresses: j.buder@iwm-kmrc.de (J. Buder), c.schwind@iwm-kmrc.de (C.
Schwind).
erences is through collaborative ltering (Sarwar, Karypis, Konstan,
& Riedl, 2001) which mostly comes in two varieties: In user-based
ltering, the behavioral prole of a target user will be compared to
the proles of other users, and recommendations for a particular
item will be derived from those users who are most similar to
the target user. The second method is item-based ltering where
the overall rating differences among items will be set against the
prole of a target user to arrive at personalized recommendations.
Personalized recommender systems are often used in
e-commerce (Schafer, Konstan, & Riedl, 1999), as the ability to sug-
gest products that are tailored to the needs and preferences of cus-
tomers provides a unique selling point. However, in recent years
the potential of personalized recommender systems for non-com-
mercial purposes has begun to be explored, e.g. in educational con-
texts. Several educational recommender systems have been
designed that recommend a broad range of items, among them soft-
ware functionalities (Linton & Schaefer, 2000), learning resources on
the Web (Geyer-Schulz, Hahsler, & Jahn, 2001; Recker, Walker, &
Lawless, 2003), Web 2.0 resources (Drachsler et al., 2010), foreign
language lessons (Hsu, 2008), learning objects (Lemire, Boley,
McGrath, & Ball, 2005), test items and assignments (Rafaeli, Barak,
Dan-Gur, & Toch, 2004), lecture notes (Farzan & Brusilovsky,
2005), or entire courses (Farzan & Brusilovsky, 2006). The applica-
tions cover very different areas of learning and education like use
of library systems (Geyer-Schulz, Hahsler, Neumann, & Thede,
2003), informal learning (Drachsler, Hummel, & Koper, 2009), mo-
bile learning (Andronico et al., 2003), learning at the workplace
(Aehnelt, Ebert, Beham, Lindstaedt, & Paschen, 2008), or within
health education (Fernandez-Luque, Karlsen, & Vognild, 2009).
Many papers on personalized recommender systems focus on
technical issues and problems, the ultimate question being: How

0747-5632/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.09.002
208 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216
do we manage to deliver the most accurate recommendation for
the current purposes? This paper, however, takes a somewhat dif-
ferent approach: It explores the psychological aspects of personal-
ized recommender systems, with the ultimate question being:
How do people react to and act upon recommender systems? This
question will be addressed with particular emphasis on the use of
recommender systems in educational contexts.
Knowing the psychological impact of recommendations on
users can be helpful for practitioners and researchers alike. If we
have a better idea how people react to recommender systems,
we can improve algorithms and interfaces in ways that make using
the system more efcient and satisfactory. Understanding how
users contribute data to recommender systems is important for
practitioners, as problems like low participation can impede sys-
tem performance. From a research perspective, a better under-
standing of the psychological impacts of recommender systems
can inform various elds, such as educational psychology (instruc-
tional design, educational technology), social psychology (persua-
sion, trust building), business administration (marketing), or
computer science (machine learning, HCI).
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 explores how the
key characteristics of personalized recommender systems t into
current thought in the learning sciences. Section 3 discusses spe-
cic requirements that recommender systems must fulll in order
to support learning processes, both with regard to two learner
roles and two types of adaptation. This discussion leads to four
conjectures about how recommender systems should be adapted
for educational contexts. Section 4 integrates the ndings, and pro-
vides an outlook on future research.
2. Recommender systems and the learning sciences
Designing and implementing workable recommender systems
can be quite burdensome. Apart from a technological infrastruc-
ture that needs to store data about each possible combination of
items and user, thereby generating substantial server load, a criti-
cal mass of users is one of the main roadblocks towards successful
implementation (Glance, Arregui, & Dardenne, 1999). If the com-
munity of people who generate data is too small, recommenda-
tions become less precise. This begs the question of whether it is
useful to implement personalized recommender systems in educa-
tional contexts. In order to answer this question, an example of a
ctitious educational recommender system is introduced. This
example will be used to illuminate main principles of recom-
mender systems design, and these principles will be compared to
principles in the learning sciences.
In our example, a psychology student is trying to nd good re-
search literature for her Masters thesis. She logs into a digital li-
brary Website which operates a recommender system on
academic publications. Lets assume that she has never used the
system before. The recommender might provide her with a list of
the most popular publications on her thesis topic. This list would
be similar to a bestseller list. Adjacent to each entry is a slider
where she can rate each publication on a range from 1 (uninterest-
ing) to 5 (highly interesting). She reads through the list, and selects
some publications that she knows. Interestingly, she dislikes some
of the popular publications, and expresses this through low ratings.
Though our student does not interact with other users of the rec-
ommender system, she is part of a larger community of others
who have also selected and rated thousands of publications. As
shown in Fig. 1, selecting entries and rating them constitutes the
activity of individuals within the community. The recommender
system then aggregates all the ratings from the communitys rating
database, and lters this information according to specied algo-
rithms. For instance, if the recommender system employs user-
based collaborative ltering algorithms, one step is to dene a
so-called neighborhood for our student, i.e. a number of users that
gave the most similar ratings to her. Once this set of neighbors is
established, the system goes through all publications that our stu-
dent has not rated yet, and identies those publications that re-
ceived the highest average ratings from the students
neighborhood. In the recommender interface, the system provides
an output of the top 10 publications; these items constitute the
recommendations. As the student (and, by the use of similarity
metrics, her neighborhood) have a non-standard taste, this list
might differ strongly from the original, bestseller-like list. If a pub-
lication is recommended that the student does not know, she
might order it. If she likes it (gives a high rating), she will become
more similar to her neighbors; if the recommendation was bad and
she gives a low rating, a new neighborhood might emerge, result-
ing in slightly different, adjusted recommendations. This ongoing
cycle between individual activities (selecting, rating) and system
activities (aggregating, ltering) rests on ve principles of recom-
mender system design (see Fig. 1).
First, recommender systems rely on collective responsibility.
In our digital library example, the data on which book recom-
mendations are based were generated by a community of peers
(Resnick & Varian, 1997). This is in contrast to ofine contexts
where recommendations often come from dedicated individuals
like teachers, mentors, or reviewers. Recommender systems do
not hand particular power to dedicated individuals, but shift
responsibility and accountability towards the user collective. A
similar principle of collective responsibility can be found in the
learning sciences (Scardamalia, 2002) where many scholars have
suggested moving from a traditional, teacher-centered education
towards a peer-centered education (Brown et al., 1993). In peer-
centered education as well as in recommender systems, a power
structure with at hierarchies emerges. Moreover, in both elds
it is assumed that peer efforts will lead to high-quality output:
The learning from peer-centered education should be at least
as high as in teacher-centered education; similarly, recommen-
dations derived from a community should at least be as good
as those from dedicated experts.
Second, recommender systems exhibit collective intelligence.
For instance, if a particular book is recommended to our student,
this recommendation cannot be traced back to the behavior of
any individual user. Rather, it is the behavior of the user collec-
tive (or in the case of user-based collaborative ltering, the
neighborhood) that is responsible for the recommendation. As
it was shown empirically that computed recommendations are
sufciently correlated with the actual ratings of a user (Herlock-
er, Konstan, Borchers, & Riedl, 1999) it can be argued that these
systems exhibit collective intelligence (Malone, Laubacher, &
Dellarocas, 2009). This idea resonates with the notion of group
cognition in the learning sciences, particularly in research on
computer-supported collaborative learning (Stahl, 2006). Accord-
ing to this view, the output of a collaborative learning group, e.g.
their discussions or the constructed artifacts, cannot be mean-
ingfully or completely traced back to individual group members,
but rather arise through complex interactions among the constit-
uents (group members). It can be said that these emergent prop-
erties of groups can also be found in the way that recommender
systems operate.
Third, recommender systems are based on user control. A book
that is suggested by a recommender system differs from a book
that is a mandatory part of a course syllabus. Our student has
the choice to follow the recommendation or not. Recommender
systems preserve user autonomy, and they do not prescribe
courses of action to be taken by a person. They typically support
information search and retrieval, i.e. tasks of a self-directed,
exploratory and often open-ended nature. In this regard, they cater
to modern constructivist epistemologies in the learning sciences
 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216
Fig. 1. Flow chart of the recommendation process. Principles of recommender systems are embedded.
that also stress the importance of self-regulated learning
(Boekaerts & Minnaert, 1999), or discovery learning (Bruner, 1961).
Fourth, recommender systems provide guidance. The student in
the digital library example is not faced with a huge list of all pub-
lications on her thesis topic, but already receives a ltered list of
those titles that are most relevant to her search. By giving direc-
tions and offering hints that a user may or may not take into ac-
count, recommender systems are equivalent to an information
signpost (Konstan & Riedl, 2003). Providing guidance is also a cen-
tral issue in the learning sciences as too much learner autonomy
can be perceived as burdensome without some form of explicit
or implicit structuring. As a consequence, principles in the learning
sciences often suggest using scaffolds (Vygotsky, 1978), scripts
(Kollar, Fischer, & Hesse, 2006), or awareness functionalities
(Engelmann, Dehler, Bodemer, & Buder, 2009) in order to provide
guidance for self-regulated activities. The key is to strike a delicate
balance between autonomy and guidance so that guidance neither
becomes too immaterial nor too directive.
Fifth, recommender systems are personalized, i.e. they sug-
gest items that are adaptively tailored to the needs, interests,
and preferences of a user. As mentioned in the digital library
example, the recommendations for our student were not a gen-
eric, bestseller-like list of most popular publications, but con-
sisted of items that were personalized with regard to her taste.
The notion of personalization also plays an important role in
the learning sciences: Different learners do not benet to the
same degree from uniform types of instruction (Cronbach &
Snow, 1977), and there is general consensus that instructional
material should be adapted to the knowledge, the needs, and
the abilities of learners. Consequently, learning technologies such
as intelligent tutoring systems (Anderson, Boyle, & Reiser, 1985)
or adaptive hypermedia environments (Brusilovsky, 2001) tailor
information to the needs and abilities of learners. Recommender
systems are based on the same general idea by matching their
output to a users historically developed prole.
Of course, the identied principles of the learning sciences
shifting responsibility towards peers, harnessing collective intelli-
gence, enabling user control, providing scaffolds, and tailoring to
needs, abilities, and interests are embedded within many infor-
mation technologies, but personalized recommender systems com-
bine all of these principles. In this regard, they exhibit features that
have the potential to leverage learning processes.
However, the t of recommender systems into learning con-
texts by no means implies that they can be transferred from their
current, mostly commercial context into educational contexts on a
one-to-one basis. Rather, they must be adapted to the peculiarities
of educational scenarios. Section 3 addresses the issues that have
to be taken into account in order to fruitfully apply recommender
systems in the educational realm.
209
3. A psychological account of educational recommender
systems
Much attention on recommender systems has been devoted to
issues of technical implementation, mathematical modeling, and
performance metrics (Adomavicius & Tuzhilin, 2005). However,
there is a growing awareness that non-technical issues should be
taken into account in order to improve personalized recommender
systems, particularly if these systems are applied in non-standard
settings like education. Consequently, some authors began theoriz-
ing about recommender system by including educational consider-
ations (Drachsler, Hummel, et al., 2009; Manouselis, Drachsler,
Vuorikari, Hummel, & Koper, 2011; Tang & McCalla, 2005; Wang,
2007). The present paper also focuses on recommender systems
in educational contexts, but it is novel in taking a psychological
point of view on the topic. Relatively little is known about how
people react to and act upon information presented via recom-
mender systems, and a psychological account might offer valuable
hints on barriers and potentials.
In the following, we propose a conceptualization that sheds a
light on various issues that have to be taken into account when
designing for educational recommender systems. The account is
structured along a distinction that was made by Xiao and Benbasat
(2007) in a conceptual paper on recommender systems in
e-commerce contexts. However, while these authors put the tech-
nology into the center by distinguishing between input character-
istics (data that a recommender system gets) and output
characteristics (data that a recommender system displays), we
make the same distinction from a learner viewpoint. In other
words, our account distinguishes between a recipient role where
learners are confronted with recommended items and a producer
role where learners generate data that are the basis for system
computations. The distinction between different roles (recipient
vs. producer) serves as a structural element for the remainder of
this paper. For each role, two issues of recommender system adap-
tation for educational contexts will be discussed. The rst issue re-
fers to system-centered adaptations: In order to work properly in
educational contexts, recommender systems must provide the
right kind of information so that learning from recommendations
is enabled (recipient role). Moreover, proper functioning of recom-
mender systems requires that user generate data on which system
computations can be performed (producer role). Apart from these
basic, system-centered adaptations the second issue explored for
recipient roles and producer roles pertains to social adaptations.
Human information processing in general, and learning in particu-
lar can be characterized by bounded rationality (Simon, 1959).
Navigation and selection of items in a recommender system (reci-
pient role) and rating of items (producer role) are inuenced by a
number of social psychological factors that can be linked to
210 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216

bounded rationality. For instance, we do not always attend to the
information from which we learn most (Tang & McCalla, 2005);
and we do not always contribute information even if an entire
community could benet from such an activity (Dawes, 1980).
Therefore, educational recommender systems can be improved
by introducing social adaptations that facilitate those information
processing biases that are conducive to learning or attenuate those
biases that are detrimental to learning.
These distinctions result in four structural elements (recipient
role vs. producer role; system-centered adaptation vs. social adap-
tation) for the following sections. In Sections 3.1 and 3.2 these is-
sues will be discussed based on theoretical considerations as well
as empirical results from various elds of research. Table 1 gives
an overview of the literature that informed the following
discussion.
3.1. Recipient role
Relatively little is known about how recommendations are per-
ceived by users. Sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 describe issues pertaining
to the learners roles as recipients of information. First, Section 3.1.1
on system-centered adaptation addresses the fact that in classical
e-commerce scenarios recommendations are tailored to user taste
(Schafer et al., 1999). In contrast, for educational contexts recom-
mendations must be tailored to learner knowledge and learner
activities. Second, Section 3.1.2 on social adaptation refers to the
fact that humans show preferences for particular types of informa-
tion, and these inherent biases are not always conducive to
learning. Several ways of adapting recommender systems are
explored that are based on ideas such as increasing the persua-
siveness of recommendations, or providing counter-intuitive
recommendations.
3.1.1. System-centered adaptation
Whereas classical recommender systems in e-commerce try to
adapt to the taste of a user, educational recommender systems
should be personalized with regard to learner knowledge and
learning activities. For a number of reasons, learner knowledge
and learning activities are more difcult to assess than user taste
(Drachsler, Hummel, & Koper, 2009): Learning is a gradual process
extending over a longer stretch of time. In commercial contexts,
effectiveness of a recommender system can be assessed by captur-
ing whether a customer has purchased a recommended item. In
contrast, learning does not have clear-dened and measurable
learning events that immediately provide information about rec-
ommender system effectiveness. Not only are constructs like
knowledge and activities difcult to assess, they are also con-
stantly changing, and they rest on multiple sequential dependen-
cies, i.e. at any given time there can be items that are too easy or
too difcult for a learner. This creates numerous situational con-
straints: An expert in a domain needs different recommendations
than a novice; different learning styles (e.g. reproducing

Table 1
Overview of reviewed studies about recommender systems.

Study Type Field Finding

Recipient role and system-centered adaptation
Adomavicius and Tuzhilin (2011) Conceptual (review)
Burke (2002) Empirical (simulation)
Drachsler, Hummel, & Koper Conceptual
(2009)
Drachsler, Hummel, van den Empirical (eld
Berg, et al. (2009) experiment, N = 250)
Nadolski et al. (2009) Empirical (simulation)
Recipient role and social adaptation
McNee et al. (2006) Conceptual
Schwind et al. (2011a) Empirical (online
experiment, N = 123)
Schwind et al. (2011b) Empirical (lab experiments,
N = 210)
Tang and McCalla (2005) Conceptual
Yoo and Gretzel (2011) Conceptual
Producer role and system-centered adaptation
Kramer (2007) Empirical (experiments;
N = 363)
McNee et al. (2003) Empirical (eld
experiment, N = 163)
Schein et al. (2002) Empirical (simulation)
Xiao and Benbasat (2007) Conceptual
Producer role and social adaptation
Harper et al. (2007) Empirical (eld
experiment, N = 268)
Herlocker et al. (2004) Conceptual
Ling et al. (2005) Empirical (eld
experiments, N = 2715)
Ludford et al. (2004) Empirical (eld
experiment, N = 245)
Rashid et al. (2006) Empirical (eld
experiment, N = 160)
Computer science
Computer science
Educational technology
Educational technology
Computer science/
educational technology
HCI
Educational psychology
Educational psychology
Educational technology
Social psychology
Marketing
HCI
Computer science
Marketing
Social psychology
HCI
Social psychology
Social psychology
HCI/social psychology
Introduces context-aware algorithms
Compares different hybrid recommender algorithms
Reects on differences between recommenders for learning vs.
commerce
Hybrid system leads to higher efciency in learning
Collaborative ltering and hybrid systems outperform no
recommendations
Makes a case that personalities are ascribed to recommender
systems (basis for persuasion)
preference-inconsistency reduces conrmation bias, but leads to
lower evaluation
Preference-inconsistency reduces conrmation bias and leads to
better elaboration
Argues that educational recommendations are not always liked
most (preference-inconsistency)
Discusses persuasion of recommender systems through source
characteristics
Task transparency leads to higher acceptance (makes a case for
explicit ratings)
User control in sign-up increases loyalty (makes a case for explicit
ratings)
Argues for implicit elicitation to overcome cold-start
Introduces distinction between implicit vs. explicit elicitation
Social comparison increases rating activity
Makes a case that motivation for contribution can differ strongly
Goal setting and utility instructions increase rating activity
Utility instruction increases rating activity
Utility interface increases rating activity

Note: Classications into type of study and ndings are reported only as they pertain to this paper.
 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216
orientation, achieving orientation, and meaning orientation) (Ent-
wistle, 1988) might require different recommendations; recom-
mendations might ideally take metacognitive skills and strategies
(Weinstein & Mayer, 1986) into account; and they should be
adapted to the goals of a learner (Boekaerts, 1998) for instance,
a learner who wants to nd an explanation on a specic algebraic
problem needs different recommendations than a learner who
seeks for general resources on algebra. As Drachsler, Hummel, &
Koper (2009) maintained, educational recommender systems
would ideally be able to situationally identify those items that cor-
respond to a learners zone of proximal development (Vygotsky,
1978), the level of ability that the learner is able to master through
scaffolding. In other words, in order to adapt to learner knowledge
and learning activities, recommender systems must be context-
aware (Adomavicius & Tuzhilin, 2011). The classical approach of
collaborative ltering through the analysis of simple ratings might
not be very helpful, as a high rating could mean that a learner
found an item easy, or challenging, or fun. However, there are dif-
ferent ways to achieve context-awareness. A rst strategy to make
recommender systems context-aware is to use machine intelli-
gence, e.g. through so-called hybrid recommender systems (Burke,
2002). These combine recommender algorithms like collaborative
ltering with content-based lters and/or learning modeling tech-
niques (Brusilovsky, 2001). By way of our digital library example
from Section 2, a publication recommender system could use a hy-
brid model that combines rating information with metadata. For
instance, if our student gave a high rating for an article, the system
could automatically increase the probability that other publica-
tions from the same author are recommended. Ontologies, tags
and metadata can be used to describe learning items in more de-
tail, and modeling techniques can be used to describe learners in
more detail. Having ontologies can also help to address the prob-
lem of sequential dependencies among learning items, and they
might pave the way for systems that do not recommend isolated
items, but actual learning paths (Drachsler, Hummel, & Koper,
2009). As to date, there are few examples of hybrid educational
recommender systems that go beyond a prototype development,
let alone a full system evaluation. However, in a detailed computer
simulation study, Nadolski et al. (2009) found that different types
of recommender systems yielded much better results (graduation
percentages, user satisfaction, graduation times) than no recom-
mendations. Further, the authors found that hybrid recommender
systems outperformed purely rating-based and purely ontology-
based recommender systems, although not by a signicant margin.
A real-world investigation of hybrid educational recommender
systems compared a group using a hybrid personalized recom-
mender system for learning activities with a no-recommendation
control group (Drachsler, Hummel, van den Berg, et al, 2009). In
a usage study covering 4 months, they found that groups using
the recommender system did not complete more activities, but
completed them faster, exhibited a greater variety of learning
paths, and expressed higher satisfaction. These examples show
that hybrid educational recommender systems are likely to have
measurable effects on learning-related variables. A second strategy
to increase context-awareness does not rely on machine intelli-
gence, but on involving learners into the recommendation process.
For instance, learners could choose among different learning paths
depending on their learning styles or concrete learning goals.
Moreover, dialogs could be provided that give learners an opportu-
nity to feed back on the situational adequacy of received recom-
mendations. While it appears that the learner involvement
strategy is less popular among system designers than the use of
hybrid recommender systems, it should be noted that active lear-
ner involvement might have additional benets. For instance, lear-
ner control and customizability of system output are related to
higher satisfaction and trust (McNee, Lam, Konstan, & Riedl,
211
2003). Moreover, involving learners into the very process of recom-
mendations caters well to the spirit of learning as a constructive
and collaborative activity. This leads to our rst conjecture:
3.1.1.1. How to achieve system-centered adaptation for recipi-
ents? Recommender systems must be context-aware in order to
correctly diagnose learner knowledge and learning activities. This
can be accomplished either through machine intelligence (hybrid
recommender systems) or through involvement of learners into
the recommendation process itself (customization, feedback
loops). It is an empirical question which of these two strategies
is superior, but a tentative conclusion could be that learner
involvement has additional educational benets.
3.1.2. Social adaptation
Information processing has a social dimension: It is colored
by attitudes, judgments, stereotypes, and affective reactions
(Bandura, 1986). This lends a social dimension to the design of
educational recommender systems as well. Some scholars hold
that computers are social actors (Nass, Moon, Morkes, Kim, &
Fogg, 1997), or that they are persuasive technologies that can
exert social inuence (Fogg, 2003). More specically, the idea
that recommender systems are perceived as social actors is sup-
ported by the observation that users ascribe a personality to
them (McNee, Riedl, & Konstan, 2006). Personalized recom-
mender systems mimic a knowledgeable person, a person that
does not only have information about a huge number of items,
but also about the tastes and preferences of a user. However,
we do not always follow a recommendation by a human being,
and of course the same might apply to recommendations from
a recommender system. This raises questions about the condi-
tions under which the selection of recommended items can be
inuenced. In order to answer these questions, it is helpful to re-
ect on biases in human information processing. Some of these
biases are conducive to learning and can be put to good use
by making recommendations more appealing. Other biases in
information processing are detrimental to particular types of
learning, so recommender systems should be designed to over-
come these biases. We now turn to conducive biases in the con-
text of literature on persuasion, followed by detrimental biases
in the context of selective exposure literature.
Dual-process models of persuasion have outlined the boundary
conditions that determine whether people are more or less in-
clined to follow a persuasive message such as a recommendation.
According to the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo,
1986), the degree to which a persuasive message is elaborated de-
pends on a recipients motivation and ability to process the mes-
sage. Low personal relevance of the message topic undermines
motivation, whereas distraction during processing impedes ability.
If motivation and ability are high, messages are carefully scruti-
nized, and persuasion mainly depends on so-called message char-
acteristics; in contrast, if motivation and/or ability are low,
persuasion mainly depends on so-called source characteristics
(McGuire, 1969). As motivation and ability are not directly control-
lable, design of educational recommender systems should try to
unfold persuasive power through message characteristics and
source characteristics. As to message characteristics, the variable
that is most often associated with them is argument strength.
For instance, the elaboration likelihood model predicts that under
conditions of high elaboration (high motivation and ability), a
strong argument becomes persuasive, whereas a weak argument
is likely to be rejected. As a consequence, the item pool of an edu-
cational recommender system should contain as many strong
arguments as possible. A second way to inuence the persuasive-
ness of a recommender system is through source characteristics,
i.e. perceived attributes of a sender (Yoo & Gretzel, 2011). For
212 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216
instance, a message becomes more persuasive if a source is
perceived as having expertise or authority (Briol & Petty, 2009;
Cialdini, 2001). Recommender systems can trigger expertise cues
by providing recommendations on a wide range of topics, and
authority cues can be generated through third-party endorse-
ments, reference to awards, or explanations that the recommended
items were suggested by experts. If an educational recommender
system is based on a pool of strong arguments, and if the system
generates authority cues and/or expertise cues, it is likely to be-
come persuasive irrespective of learner characteristics like motiva-
tion and ability.
While persuasion makes productive use of information process-
ing biases like the tendency to follow strong arguments, or author-
ity-endorsed arguments, biases can also represent a hindrance to
certain forms of learning. For instance, a robust nding in the liter-
ature on communication science holds that people are prone to
selective exposure, i.e. they attend to only parts of the information
that is presented to them (Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009). In
particular, many people exhibit conrmation bias, the tendency to
actively seek for information that conrms initial preferences
(Jonas, Schulz-Hardt, Frey, & Thelen, 2001). The reason for this bias
can be traced back to dissonance theory (Festinger, 1954) which
posits that people tend to avoid stimuli that create cognitive disso-
nance. While conrmation bias is rarely addressed in the learning
sciences, we believe that it can play a pivotal role in those areas of
education where the goal is to challenge existing beliefs and opin-
ions. One such area is critical and open-minded thinking which in-
volves that learners question not only other opinions, but also their
own opinion (Stanovich & West, 1997). Critical thinking and unbi-
ased reasoning can be linked to educationally relevant constructs
like multiperspectivity (Spiro & Jehng, 1990) and informational
diversity (De Wit & Greer, 2008). However, in order to become crit-
ical thinkers, learners must overcome conrmation bias, but a clas-
sical recommender system would do little to avert this bias, as it
would suggest items that are consistent to a learners preference.
What would be needed, then, is a recommender system that does
the opposite, i.e. trying to capture the preferred opinions of learn-
ers, and confronting them with opposing viewpoints. For instance,
if the student in our digital library example wants to write her
Masters thesis on a particular theory, it might be useful to recom-
mend at least some publications that are critical of this theory. The
efciency of preference-inconsistent recommendations in critical
thinking contexts was investigated in our empirical work
(Schwind, Buder, & Hesse, 2011a; Schwind, Buder, & Hesse,
2011b). Our experimental paradigm involved presenting prefer-
ence-consistent and preference-inconsistent information to learn-
ers who searched for information on the controversial topic of
neuro-enhancement. Simply making preference-inconsistent infor-
mation available was no sufcient strategy to overcome conrma-
tion bias, as participants in a no-recommendation control group
selected preference-consistent information more frequently than
preference-inconsistent information. However, when preference-
inconsistent information was not only made available, but was rec-
ommended through visual highlighting, conrmation bias was
strongly reduced. Moreover, preference-inconsistent recommen-
dations improved elaboration, as exemplied by a less conrma-
tion-biased item recall, and by more divergent thinking patterns
in subsequent essays. However, our studies have also shown that
preference-inconsistent items were less liked by learners than
preference-consistent items, a nding that mirrors Tang and
McCallas (2005) viewpoint according to which information that
is most useful from an educational perspective is often not the
one that is liked most. While this problem might be averted by
making preference-inconsistent recommendations more appealing
(e.g. by verbally framing them as challenges), our empirical
results are promising signs that these counter-intuitive
recommendations can help to facilitate critical thinking. This leads
to our second conjecture.
3.1.2.1. How to achieve social adaptation for recipients? This can be
accomplished by considering biases in human information pro-
cessing. Learners are more likely to accept strong arguments and
arguments that are accompanied by expertise cues and authority
cues. Detrimental processing biases like conrmation bias can be
mitigated by explicitly recommending items that run counter to
a learners preference. Actually recommending these items is a bet-
ter strategy than just making preference-inconsistent items avail-
able. The use of preference-inconsistent recommendations is
helpful for educational settings that try to challenge a learners
existing viewpoints and beliefs.
3.2. Producer role
In Section 2 on recommender systems and the learning sciences
it was argued that recommender systems are peer technologies
that exhibit collective intelligence through the input of many indi-
viduals. However, in order to generate accurate predictions and
unfold collective intelligence, recommender systems are strongly
dependent on data that express how users think about a given
item. Consequently, the role of users as producers of these data
is a central issue in research on personalized recommender sys-
tems. In Sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 it is explored how recommender
systems should be adapted to cater to the peculiarities of educa-
tional scenarios. Like in the section on the recipient role, the dis-
cussion is structured by two issues. The rst issue pertains to
system-centered adaptation, and it is guided by the design consid-
eration of whether a recommender system should use explicit lear-
ner output like ratings, or whether implicit methods of capturing
user data should be preferred. The second issue on social adapta-
tion then explores how detrimental learner behaviors like low con-
tribution to a recommender system can be averted by making
productive use of those biases that are conducive to the production
of rating data.
3.2.1. System-centered adaptation
Recommender systems rely on the output from users. This cre-
ates a basic design decision of how these user data can be yielded.
There are two fundamental ways to accomplish this goal, viz. im-
plicit vs. explicit elicitation methods (Xiao & Benbasat, 2007). Im-
plicit elicitation requires capturing user navigation (site visits,
dwell times on sites, purchases) and take these data as indicators
of user preferences. In contrast, explicit elicitation requires a ded-
icated response of users, typically in the form of ratings on items.
There are a number of advantages associated with implicit prefer-
ence elicitation: It is unobtrusive, i.e. it does not burden a user with
the additional task of rating, thereby reducing the cold start prob-
lems that occur until the system has gathered enough preference
data to yield accurate predictions (Schein, Popescul, Ungar, &
Pennock, 2002). Moreover, implicit preference elicitation might
be more objective than explicit ratings, as it does not involve a bias
of users to respond in a socially desirable way (Fisher, 1993). How-
ever, explicit rating methods have a number of advantages as well.
Kramer (2007) reported that explicit methods of eliciting user pref-
erences led to higher acceptance rates for recommendations than
implicit and opaque methods. This led Xiao and Benbasat (2007)
to conclude that explicit methods might help users to gain insights
on their preferences and therefore increases decision quality. Im-
plicit methods might lead to psychological reactance, a negative
reaction to a restriction of autonomy (Dillard & Shen, 2005),
whereas explicit ratings are associated with user control, which
in turn is related to satisfaction and trust in recommender systems
(McNee et al., 2003). Another potential advantage of explicit rating
 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216
methods is that users might be better able than computers to make
judgments on subjective and fuzzy rating categories (Norman,
1993). For instance, in the digital library example it would be dif-
cult for implicit elicitation methods to differentiate those publica-
tions that our student selected and subsequently regarded as
inappropriate from those publications that she found useful after
reading the abstract. This problem would not have occurred if both
the inappropriate and the useful item had been explicitly rated.
Recommender systems in e-commerce have the primary goal to
make users aware of items that might be interesting to them,
thereby increasing cross-sell of items. In this light, it is quite rea-
sonable not to burden users with additional rating activities and
opt for implicit preference elicitation. In contrast, for educational
recommender systems the use of ratings might have additional
benets, as explicit elicitation can be regarded as a form of partic-
ipation (Ling et al., 2005). Participation is a highly pervasive notion
in the learning sciences. For instance, the amount of contributions
that a learner produces during interaction is regarded as an impor-
tant antecedent of learning outcomes (Cohen, 1994). Participation
requires learners to reect on an issue, thereby leading to deeper
elaboration (Kollar et al., 2006), and in this regard explicit rating
instructions can serve as a valuable metacognitive prompt (Palinc-
sar & Brown, 1984). For this reason, explicit elicitation of user data
through ratings appears to be a promising approach for educa-
tional recommender systems. This leads to our third conjecture:
3.2.1.1. How to achieve system-centered adaptation for produc-
ers? Recommender systems can either be fueled by explicit elici-
tation methods (ratings) or implicit methods. The positive link
between participation and learning speaks in favor of explicit elic-
itation methods rather than unobtrusive and implicit methods.
Through rating activities, learners are required to reect on the
merits of a recommended item, and this might function as a valu-
able metacognitive prompting strategy.
3.2.2. Social adaptation
In Section 3.1.2 on the recipient role it was argued that human
information processing has a social dimension and is colored by
biases, preferences, and habits. A similar case can be made for
the producer role, particularly in cases of explicit elicitation
through ratings. Rating an item represents a social dilemma
(Dawes, 1980). Such a dilemma occurs when (a) it appears rational
for each individual to withhold rather than produce or share infor-
mation, and (b) it is better for the collective if every member con-
tributed rather than withheld information. This is the case for
recommender systems where rating requires some effort, but the
immediate benet of rating is not evident to a user. Social dilem-
mas can lead to detrimental behaviors like social loang and
free-riding (Karau & Williams, 1993). As social loang directly im-
pedes the quality of a recommender system, this raises the ques-
tion of how this detrimental behavior can be averted. As users
are highly likely to respond to social cues, the basic idea here is
to emphasize the social aspects of a recommender system. While
recommender systems are peer technologies, there is no direct
peer-to-peer interaction, and the community of users remains
anonymous and invisible to an individual. However, by making
the community more visible, powerful social psychological mech-
anisms can be evoked. Two strategies are built on these mecha-
nisms, and their impact on the quantity of ratings has been
investigated empirically. The rst strategy makes use of the nor-
mative power of groups, either through introduction of social com-
parisons or through goal setting. Depending on prevalent social
identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), individuals adhere to group norms,
and this adherence can even be stronger when members are anon-
ymous (Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995). If the group norm is
about member productivity, rating quantity can be increased by
213
introducing social comparisons (Festinger, 1954). This was investi-
gated by Harper, Li, Chen and Konstan (2007). They gave bogus
feedback to participants of the movie recommender system Movie-
Lens which indicated that the number of ratings that an individual
has provided was lower, the same, or higher than a comparable
group of community members, and contrasted this to a condition
without such feedback. It was shown that upward comparison
(feedback about under-performance) led to the highest number
of produced ratings in the following week. Even downward com-
parison (feedback about over-performance) led to a higher number
of ratings than the control condition without social comparison
information. A different normative approach was investigated by
Ling et al. (2005) who reported that setting of concrete norms
and goals like rating a xed number of items led to higher produc-
tivity than setting unspecic do your best-goals, at least when
the goal seemed attainable. Taken together, it appears that making
norms of a community salient can exert normative power which in
turn increases productivity. The second strategy to appeal to the
social nature of recommender systems is by making ones contri-
bution more valuable. The collective effort model (Karau &
Williams, 1993) posits that social loang will be reduced when
people believe that their contribution is useful to a community.
Moreover, it states that people contribute more when they identify
with similar others. In the digital library example of Section 2, our
student had a taste that differed from the mainstream. In this re-
gard, her ratings are particularly valuable for the sub-group of
like-minded people. But she might neither know that her taste is
special, nor that there are like-minded people. Therefore it would
be helpful if some information on the utility of ratings were pro-
vided. This issue has been investigated in three recommender-re-
lated studies. Two of these studies manipulated utility by telling
subjects that they either had a very unique taste (high utility) or
a very typical taste (low utility) (Ling et al., 2005; Ludford, Cosley,
Frankowski, & Terveen, 2004). The authors conrmed the predic-
tion of the collective effort model that uniqueness instructions lead
to more contributions. A third study, conducted by Rashid et al.
(2006) used a more technology-oriented approach to employ util-
ity information. The authors created a recommender interface
where each unrated item had a display that indicated how helpful
it would be for target persons if it were rated. In line with the col-
lective effort model, it was found that displaying the rating utility
led to higher contribution rates than a control condition. It was
also conrmed that people felt more motivated to contribute for
the good of similar target persons than dissimilar others. Contrary
to expectations, fewer items were rated when the benet to one-
self was stressed. This is somewhat surprising, as the quality of rec-
ommendations for an individual increases with the number of
ratings that this individual has produced. However Herlocker,
Konstan, Terveen, & Riedl (2004) have pointed out that motivations
for user ratings can be quite different: Some users simply want to
express themselves; some users are driven by social motivations
like helping others, or manipulating others; and for some users,
gaming the system is the main motivation to provide ratings in a
recommender system. In all these examples, utility for oneself does
not play a major role. In contrast, making the social impact of ones
recommendation salient is an effective method to boost rating
activities. This leads to our fourth conjecture.
3.2.2.1. How to achieve social adaptation for producers? This can be
accomplished either by making group norms visible (through so-
cial comparisons or concrete goal setting), or by providing informa-
tion about the usefulness that rating provides for (similar) others.
For educational contexts, the strategy of stressing the utility of rat-
ings might be superior to the social comparison strategy, as both
upward and downward comparisons were reported to be associ-
ated with negative affect (Buunk, Collins, Taylor, van Yperen, &
214 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216

Table 2
Contrast between e-commerce requirements and educational requirements with regard to recommender system design, and resulting design strategies for educational contexts.

Issue
Recipient role/system-
centered adaptation
Recipient role/social
adaptation
Producer role/system-
centered adaptation
Producer role/social
adaptation
Requirement for e- Educational requirement Design strategy for educational recommender systems
commerce
Personalization with Context-aware personalization with regard Hybrid systems
regard to taste to knowledge/activities Learner feedback
Customization
Persuasiveness; Persuasiveness; challenges and critical Strong arguments; expertise/authority cues; preference-
preference-consistency thinking inconsistent recommendations
Low burden; implicit Participation, metacognitive stimulation Explicit ratings
elicitation
High number of ratings High number of ratings Providing utility information

Dakof, 1990). Moreover, providing utility information is more
likely to appeal to the collaborative spirit that fuels recommender
systems.
4. Conclusions
This paper explored the potentials of personalized recom-
mender systems in educational settings. It is argued that recom-
mender systems t nicely to important principles in the learning
sciences: (1) Recommender systems are peer technologies that
shift responsibility away from dedicated experts. (2) Recom-
mender systems are technologies where the quality of content is
not traceable to any individual output, but rather to the collective
behavior of a community. (3) Recommender systems provide user
control, thereby facilitating self-regulated, exploratory, and auton-
omous learning. (4) Recommender systems provide guidance to
learning activities. (5) Recommender systems are adaptively tai-
lored to the needs and requirements of learners.
However, it would clearly be a mistake to apply standard rec-
ommender systems to learning scenarios without adapting them
to educational needs. Section 3 of this paper structured issues sur-
rounding educational applications of recommender systems with
regard to two roles that learners exhibit, viz. as recipients of infor-
mation and as producers of data. For each of these two roles, two
issues were discussed: One with regard to system-oriented adapta-
tions that enable proper functioning of educational recommender
systems, the other with regard to social adaptations that exert an
inuence on how learners react to and act upon recommendations.
On the basis of theoretical and empirical ndings from various re-
search elds design-related questions were posed and answered. A
summary of that discussion can be found in Table 2. The leftmost
column of this Table represents the four issues that were raised
in the discussion. The second and third columns contrast the
requirements for classical recommender systems in e-commerce
vs. educational recommender systems. And the rightmost column
proposes design strategies for educational recommender systems.
Rather than repeating the issues discussed in preceding sec-
tions, wed like to point out some recurring thoughts, particularly
about the differences between e-commerce recommender systems
and educational recommender systems. In classical e-commerce
scenarios, the main goal of designers is to increase cross-sell of
items. The corresponding recommender systems can be character-
ized by a number of typical features. These systems are adapted to
user taste, and they try to keep the potential burden of system
usage to a minimum. As a consequence, the solutions rely heavily
on constraining system output, preferably through machine intel-
ligence. Although there is some awareness among designers that
recommender systems should support serendipity and diversity
of result lists (Ziegler, McNee, Konstan, & Lausen, 2005), the gen-
eral consensus seems to be that a recommender system should
not come up with anything that is unexpected by a user. Most
importantly, user activity should be minimized, e.g. by implicit
preference elicitation, or by employing hybrid systems with ontol-
ogies and user modeling techniques. This strategy of minimal
interference might be useful in commercial contexts, though it
can be argued that it appears as somewhat outdated in an age
where user-generated content has become so pervasive. However,
it is quite evident that such a strategy should not be adapted for
learning contexts. Educational recommender systems are not
geared at selling items, but at facilitating learning. Learning is an
active and constructive process (Vygotsky, 1978), therefore it
seems only natural to involve and engage learners in the very pro-
cess they undergo. This is reected in the suggested design strate-
gies of Table 2: It can be helpful both for system performance and
for learner satisfaction to provide customization options, and to
give opportunities to leave feedback on system accuracy. Rating
of items should not be regarded as a burden to learning, but rather
as an opportunity for learning. Making the community visible by
emphasizing the utility that rating has for others fuels the collab-
orative spirit that is needed for effective recommender systems.
And nally, educational recommender systems should involve
learners by challenging them. Rather than providing learners with
a strongly constrained environment, they should leave ample room
for exploration and confront learners with unexpected content,
thus allowing for serendipity and learning through discovery. All
these differences between e-commerce and educational contexts
call for an adaptation of personalized recommender systems so
that they can become powerful tools for learning.
Of course, this overview of the potentials of recommender sys-
tems in educational contexts is not exhaustive. For instance, we did
not cover interface issues, basically because we think that they do
not require specic adaptations for educational scenarios. Readers
who are interested in these aspects might refer to usability studies
(Herlocker, Konstan, & Riedl, 2000), studies showing serial position
effects for recommended items (Felfernig et al., 2007), or work on
the display of ratings (Cosley, Lam, Albert, Konstan, & Riedl, 2003).
Our overview was also restricted to the impact of recommenda-
tions during learning, and we did not address general aspects of
recommender use, most of which is covered by literature on trust
(Swearingen & Sinha, 2002). Finally, we focused on the most com-
mon types of recommender systems, thereby excluding variations
like recommender systems for groups (Buder & Schwind, 2011), or
people recommender (Cai et al., 2011).
Many of the design considerations that were suggested in this
paper rest on speculation. This is due to the scarcity of research
in a relatively new eld. We hold that research on personalized
recommender systems should not only focus on the development
of better algorithms and implementations, but should be comple-
mented by sound, empirical work on how learners react to and
act upon recommender systems. In order to see whether the
assumptions of this paper can be conrmed, must be rejected, or
require renement, three types of research are needed. First, we
need more practical implementations of recommender systems
 J. Buder, C. Schwind / Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 207216
in educational contexts. Though some applications are around,
many of them do not move beyond a prototype development.
Implementation studies would typically be case studies or experi-
ments with a tool vs. no tool condition. Second, we need more
applied experimental research that varies boundary conditions,
but keeps technology constant. For instance, it would be interest-
ing to see how one and the same recommender system works with
different tasks, or different learners with different learning styles
and different prociency levels. This would help illuminating the
potentials and the limitations of educational recommender sys-
tems. And third, we need more research on the basic psychological
mechanisms that are addressed when learners use a recommender
system. For instance, our own empirical work on the effectiveness
of preference-inconsistent recommendations, while not employing
a full-blown recommender system, can be regarded as a step to-
wards uncovering the psychological dynamics that specic types
of recommendations create.
Technologies need to have an added value in order to become
incorporated in everyday learning settings. Technologies must
make us capable of accomplishing things that are impossible to
yield by any other means. Recommender systems have many fasci-
nating features, among them providing learners with access to
information that no other method can accomplish. In light of these
potentials it is more than likely that recommenders for learning are
here to stay. However, their exploration by social scientists has just
begun.
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