Educational Technology International

The Korean Society for Education Technology (한국교육공학회)
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Increasing Persona Effects: Does It Matter the Voice and Appearance of Animated Pedagogical Agent

  • Received : 2018.03.22
  • Accepted : 2018.04.05
  • Published : 2018.04.30
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Abstract

The animated pedagogical agent has been implemented to promote learning outcomes and motivation in multimedia learning. It has been claimed that one of the advantages of using pedagogical agent is persona effect - the personalization or social presence of pedagogical agent can enhance learning engagement and motivation. However, prior research is inconclusive as to whether and how the features of the pedagogical agent have effects on the persona effect. This study investigated whether the similarity between a pedagogical agent and the real instructor in terms of the voice and outlook would improve students' perception of the agent's persona. The study also examined the effect by the size of pedagogical agent on the persona perception. Two experiments were conducted with a total of 115 college students. Experiment 1 indicated a significant main effect of voice on the persona perception. Experiment 2 was conducted to examine whether the size of pedagogical agent would affect the voice effect on the persona perception. The results showed that the instructor-like voice yielded higher persona perception regardless of the pedagogical agent's size. Overall, the study findings indicated that the similarity in voice positively fostered the agent's persona.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A5A2A01017333)

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