Do a pedagogical agent’s clothing and an animated video’s setting affect learning?

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Martin Merkt¹  Daniela Decker² 

[1] German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning, Bonn, Germany;null;

关键词: pedagogical agent;    adult learning;    distance education;    online learning;    clothing;    setting;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1205338

 received in 2023-04-13, accepted in 2023-09-12,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Pedagogical agents are often used to enhance social cues in learning materials. The inclusion of pedagogical agents raises several design questions, for example on what kind of clothing the agent should wear. Further, it is not yet clear how the setting of an animated learning video (i.e., the digitally created background) affects learning. In an online experiment (N = 200), we investigated whether creating thematically appropriate clothing and setting has some added value in that it improves learning outcomes in comparison to more neutral assets. Whereas all participants acquired knowledge from the animated video, there were no main effects of clothing and setting for any of the dependent variables, but an interaction for learning outcomes (ηp2=0.02), indicating that the appropriately dressed agent worked better combined with the inappropriate setting than with the appropriate setting. Overall, given those non-significant main effects and the small effect size of the interaction, there seem to be some degrees of freedom for designers of pedagogical agents in animated learning videos. However, these degrees of freedom may be limited to at least moderate (i.e., neutral) levels of appropriateness.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Decker and Merkt.