The study seeks to investigate both learners' agent preferences and the effects of pedagogical agents on learners' academic success, motivation and cognitive load.
These promising development opens a myriad of exciting potential benefits (and questions) regarding the socio-emotive and cognitive aspects of learner-agent interaction.
Hence, the theoretical framework of emotional response that has been established in conventional classroom settings [17 19], was also shown to be relevant in the context of affective and motivational aspects of learner-agent interaction in a multimedia learning environment.
Similarly, learners in enthusiastic agent condition gave significantly higher ratings for agent perceptions than did learners in neutral agent condition.
Though there was no difference between the perceived credibility of each agent, learners nevertheless rated the enthusiastic agent as friendlier than the neutral agent.
An imitative strategy, namely mutual following, is used to create a common perceptual context to learner and teacher agents, upon which the learner grounds its understanding of the teacher's words.
Specifically, learners in enthusiastic agent condition reported a significantly higher degree of willingness to interact with the pedagogical agent and the multimedia learning environment again in the future.
If this correlation reached significance, it would support the hypothesis that learners would prefer agent dialogs if they were interested in conceptual mastery (H3).
A series of independent samples t-tests were conducted to compare learner perception regarding the agent's likeability, knowledge, credibility, friendliness, willingness to learn from agent, and total scores of the perceptions.
These results shed new light on the dynamics between e-learners and trainer agents, and inform the design of agent-based training.
