Vázquez Cano, EstebanMengual Andrés, SantiagoLópez Meneses, Eloy2025-09-022025-09-022021-06-28Vázquez Cano, E., Mengual Andrés, S., & López Meneses, E. (2021). Chatbot to improve learning punctuation in Spanish and to enhance open and flexible learning environments. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18, 33. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00269-82365-9440https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00269-8https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/29962The registered version of this article, first published in “International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18, 2021", is available online at the publisher's website: SpringerOpen, https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00269-8 La versión registrada de este artículo, publicado por primera vez en “International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18, 2021", está disponible en línea en el sitio web del editor: SpringerOpen, https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00269-8Proyecto I+D+I titulado: “Gamificación y aprendizaje ubicuo en Educación Primaria. Elaboración de un mapa de competencias y recursos docentes, discentes y parentales (GAUBI)” (RTI2018-099764-B-100) (MICINN /FEDER), financiado por el Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) y Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de EspañaThe objective of this article is to analyze the didactic functionality of a chatbot to improve the results of the students of the National University of Distance Education (UNED / Spain) in accessing the university in the subject of Spanish Language. For this, a quasi-experimental experiment was designed, and a quantitative methodology was used through pretest and posttest in a control and experimental group in which the effectiveness of two teaching models was compared, one more traditional based on exercises written on paper and another based on interaction with a chatbot. Subsequently, the perception of the experimental group in an academic forum about the educational use of the chatbot was analyzed through text mining with tests of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), pairwise distance matrix and bigrams. The quantitative results showed that the students in the experimental group substantially improved the results compared to the students with a more traditional methodology (experimental group / mean: 32.1346 / control group / mean: 28.4706). Punctuation correctness has been improved mainly in the usage of comma, colon and periods in different syntactic patterns. Furthermore, the perception of the students in the experimental group showed that they positively value chatbots in their teaching–learning process in three dimensions: greater “support” and companionship in the learning process, as they perceive greater interactivity due to their conversational nature; greater “feedback” and interaction compared to the more traditional methodology and, lastly, they especially value the ease of use and the possibility of interacting and learning anywhere and anytime.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess58 Pedagogíajournal articlechatboteducationartificial intelligencemobile learningcommunicationvirtual learning environments