• Educational Technology International
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.61-91
• /
• 2018

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.

• Educational Technology International
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.1-26
• /
• 2014

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.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.73-82
• /
• 2023

A 2(pedagogical agent: with vs. without) × 2(on-screen text: with vs. without) between-subject design was used in this study to investigate the effects of pedagogical agent and redundant on-screen text on video learning. In the case of the educational video without redundant on-screen text, there was no difference in social presence, satisfaction, and intention to continue learning regardless of the presence of a pedagogical agent. However, when the educational video contained redundant on-screen text, participants who watched educational video with pedagogical agent perceived higher social presence, satisfaction and intention to continue. In terms of academic achievement, no difference was found whether redundant on-screen text was contained or not. It supports some of the previous studies on the reverse-redundancy effects, suggesting that the inclusion of redundant text does not necessarily cause the reduction of learning outcomes. Video learning shows a higher dropout rate than face-to-face learning. Therefore, it is particularly important to understand how to strengthen interactions with learners and motivate them to keep themselves engaged in learning. This study discussed whether pedagogical agent and on-screen text are factors that induce continuous participation of learners in video learning.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.22 no.2
• /
• pp.358-369
• /
• 2022

The purpose of this study is to verify the anthropomorphic design factors of pedagogical agents that can enhance user experience in learning foreign languages (English) through smartphones. In this study, when designing a pedagogical agent that delivers content, the presence or absence of the agent's image, the degree of human nature (HN), and role setting (leader vs. companion) among the anthropomorphic factors that influence facilitating learning, credibility, and engagement perception. As a result of the experiment, HN alone did not show a facilitating learning effect, and images and roles improved not only the facilitating learning effect but also other user experience factors. When HN factors were designed in combination with image and role factors, they were effective in overall user experience effects such as facilitating learning, credibility, and engagement.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.281-292
• /
• 2013

The purpose of this study was to identify the effect of gesture and facial expression on persona effects. Fifty-six college students were recruited for this study, and non-verbal communication skills were applied to a pedagogical agent with gesture (conversational vs. deictic) and facial expression. The conversational gesture may have relationship with social interaction hypothesis of pedagogical agent while the deictic gesture may have relationship with attentional guidance hypothesis. The facial expression can be assumed to facilitate the social interaction between the pedagogical agent and learners. Interestingly, the conversational gesture group showed a tendency of outperforming the deictic gesture group. It may imply that the social interaction theory has a strong impact on cognitive support as well as social interaction for learners. There was a significant interaction effect on the engagement when both of facial expression and conversational gesture were applied. This result has two implications. First, facial expression can facilitate the persona effect for engagement.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.47-56
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this study is to test the effect of pedagogical agent realism and expertise on persona effect. There were two perspectives of the pedagogical agents' social interaction. Self-identification hypothesis argues that complexity of agent image is better to increase social interaction. Subjective identification insists that simplified image is more helpful to facilitate social interaction. However, from the cognitive load theory perspective, learners' expertise can be a major factor to determine persona effect. Sixty-eight college students (male=19 and female=49) participated. The independent variables were the degree of realism of pedagogical agent (detailed vs. simplified image) and the expertise (high prior knowledge group vs. low prior knowledge group). The dependant variables were comprehension test and the agent persona instrument (API). There was no significant difference in comprehension test score; however, there were significant interaction effect on the most constructs of API: 1) facilitating of learning, 2) credible, and 3) human-like. The follow-up analysis of simple main effect revealed that high expertise group showed significantly higher perception of the three construct with high realism of pedagogical agent. The results of study show that learners' expertise plays a key role of perception of persona effect.

• International Journal of Contents
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.25-43
• /
• 2016

An agent-centric event planning method is proposed for providing pedagogical experiences in an immersed environment. Two-level planning is required at in a macro-level (i.e., inter-event level) and an intra-event level to provide realistic experiences with the objective of learning declarative knowledge. The inter-event (horizontal) planning is based on search, while intra-event (vertical) planning is based on hierarchical decomposition. The horizontal search is dictated by several realistic types of association between events besides the conventional causality. The resulting schematic plan is further augmented by conditions associated with those agents cast into the roles of the events identified in the plan. Rather than following a main story plot, all the events potentially relevant to accomplishing an initial goal are derived in the final result of our planning. These derived events may progress concurrently or digress toward a new main goal replacing the current goal or event, and the plan could be merged or fragmented according to their respective lead agents' intentions and other conditions. The macro-level coherence across interconnected events is established via their common background world existing a priori. As the pivotal source of event concurrency and intricacy, agents are modeled to not only be autonomous but also independent, i.e., entities with their own beliefs and goals (and subsequent plans) in their respective parts of the world. Additional problems our method addresses for augmenting pedagogical experiences include casting of agents into roles based on their availability, subcontracting of subsidiary events, and failure of multi-agent event entailing fragmentation of a plan. The described planning method was demonstrated by monitoring implementation.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.55-64
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this study is to identify how realism of pedagogical agent can have impacts on persona effect and cognitive load factors. Eighty-two college students participated, and the independent variables of this study were the degree of image details and presence of gesture. The degree of image details were picture, illustration, and line-drawing. The $3{\times}2$ factorial design was applied. There was a significant interaction effect on the engaging of agent persona instrument. When the learners were under the condition of line-drawing agent without gesture, they showed the highest score on engaging of the agent persona instrument. Regarding the cognitive load factors, when learners under the condition of line-drawing showed the highest score of self-evaluation.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.1 no.1 s.1
• /
• pp.107-111
• /
• 2005

When a pedagogical agent system aims to provide students with interactive help, it needs to know what knowledge the student has and what goals the student is currently trying to achieve. That is, it must do both assessment and plan recognition. These modeling tasks involve a high level of uncertainty when students are allowed to follow various lines of reasoning and are not required to show all their reasoning explicitly. In this paper, the student model for interactive edutainment applications is proposed. This model is based on Bayesian Networks to expose constructs and parameters of rules and propositions pertaining to game and problem solving activities. This student model could be utilized as the emotion generation model for student and agent as well.

• International Journal of Contents
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.7-16
• /
• 2018

The extent and depth of the event plan determines the scope of pedagogical experience in situations and consequently the quality of immersive learning based on our simulated world. In contrast to planning in conventional narrative-based systems mainly pursuing dramatic interests, planning in virtual world-based pedagogical systems strive to provide realistic experiences in immersed situations. Instead of story plot comprising predetermined situations, our inter-event planning method aims at simulating diverse situations that each involve multiple events coupled via their associated agents' conditions and meaningful associations between events occurring in a background world. The specific techniques to realize our planning method include, two-phase planning based on inter-event search and intra-event decomposition (down to the animated action level); autonomous and independent agents to behave proactively with their own belief and planning capability; full-blown background world to be used as the comprehensive stage for all events to occur in; coupling events via realistic association types including deontic associations as well as conventional causality; separation of agents from event roles; temporal scheduling; and parallel and concurrent event progression mechanism. Combining all these techniques, diverse exogenous events can be derived and seamlessly (i.e., semantically meaningfully) integrated with the original event to form a wide scope of situations providing chances of abundant pedagogical experiences. For effective implementation of plan execution, we devise an execution scheme based on multiple priority queues, particularly to realize concurrent progression of many simultaneous events to simulate its corresponding reality. Specific execution mechanisms include modeling an action in terms of its component motions, adjustability of priority for agent across different events, and concurrent and parallel execution method for multiple actions and its expansion for multiple events.