Design Principles of Animated Pedagogical Agent and Instructional Message for Affective Learning

The purpose of this study was to develop design principles of both animated pedagogical agents as 'credible' persuasive message source and persuasive fear arousing instructional messages in order to help enhance attitude changes toward a certain issue. Based on the previous pedagogical agent research, this study drew the design principles providing ways to manipulate agent credibility level and fear arousing level of message. Consequently, it specified how to make pedagogical agents perceived less or more credible by learners by manipulating a variety of agent features. For fear arousing message, this study showed how fear arousing messages would be structured into one of three levels: non-threatening, moderately threatening, and strongly threatening. Two different agent conditions and three message conditions were actually developed and experimentally tested with the participants of 40 undergraduate students. The results showed that the agent design principles specified from the previous research worked well enough to make a distinction between the more credible agent and the less credible agent. The overall results of this study may indicate that the design strategies for fear arousing message are retained on the premise of some future refinements.