The effects of animated pedagogical agents in an English-as-a-foreign-language learning environment
Introduction
Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) are animated on-screen characters that assist learners in multimedia learning environments (Johnson et al., 1998, Lester and Stone, 1997). APAs can exhibit various types of lifelike behaviors, including speech, emotions, gestures, and movements of the eyes, head, and even body (Dehn and van Mulken, 2000). Such characters can flexibly represent numerous pedagogical roles, including those of instructors, coaches, tutors, and learning companions (Chou et al., 2003, Baylor and Kim, 2005, Haake and Gulz, 2009).
Since APAs’ behaviors in some way mimic social exchange present in human interactions, they are considered to be a powerful addition to multimedia learning environments, because they allow these environments to exploit both verbal and nonverbal forms of communication (Johnson and Lester, 2015). Furthermore, as some research (Jeung et al., 1997, Mousavi et al., 1995) has indicated, APAs can be used during the learning process to partially reduce cognitive load.
However, using APAs is not invariably beneficial. One negative effect of their use can be the so-called split-attention effect, which occurs when the agent and its presence are not cognitively integrated enough for the content to be taught. In such cases, the image of the agent represents an additional, non-desirable cognitive load, likely because students are distracted by the agent and pay more attention to it than to the visual content that should be integrated with the spoken text (Dunsworth and Atkinson, 2007, Craig et al., 2002). A possible alternative to avoid the split-attention effect is to explicitly direct learners’ visual attention to the content (Alibali and DiRusso, 1999).
In research on APAs in multimedia learning environments conducted over the years (Johnson et al., 1998, Lester and Stone, 1997, Finkelstein et al., 2013, Jaques et al., 2009), a recurring issue has been how to evaluate agents toward determining which degree of agent embodiment is most effective. For these evaluations, Atkinson (2002) has proposed three agent effects to take into consideration: the image effect, which represents whether the agent's on-screen presence helps in learning; the embodied agent effect, which concerns simulating the student–instructor relationship; and the modality effect, which holds that orally delivered instruction aids learning more effectively than textually delivered instruction. Moreover, some studies, including that of Lusk and Atkinson (2007), have investigated the so-called expressiveness effect, which maintains the effectiveness of fully embodied agents using gestures, locomotion, and gazes over static APAs.
Although several studies in different learning domains have sought to verify how these different effects impact students’ learning, we are not aware of any studies that have investigated these four effects together in the same learning system. Some studies have tried to verify the image effect, the embodied agent and the modality effect in the same learning system (Atkinson, 2002, Dunsworth and Atkinson, 2007). However, these effects do not consider static versions of the agent, which limits conclusions about the impact of the agent's level of animation on learning. Adding the evaluation of the expressiveness effect in the same experiment allows us to verify and compare the effects of the agent's level of animation independently from other features of the agent.
This paper reports a study of the four aforementioned effects in an experiment involving a multimedia computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system. We hypothesize that our system will be able to demonstrate all the four abovementioned effects, i.e., that the agent's visual presence (image effect), ability to simulate the student–instructor relationship (embodied agent effect), voice (modality effect), and gestures locomotion and gazes (expressiveness effect) facilitate learning.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses APAs and the effects proposed by Atkinson (2002) and by Lusk and Atkinson (2007). The system created for the project is described in Section 3, while the experiment is detailed in Section 4.1. Results from the data appear in Section 5, a discussion of the results in Section 6 and some final remarks in Section 7.
Section snippets
The agent effects
Although findings of previous studies suggest that the use of APAs facilitates learning (Johnson et al., 1998, Lester and Stone, 1997, Finkelstein et al., 2013, Jaques et al., 2009, Schroeder et al., 2013), Lusk and Atkinson (2007) posit that the effectiveness of APAs may in part be due to their degree of embodiment. Thus, we need to study features of agents in different APAs’ degrees of embodiment to build most effective agents.
Moreno and Mayer (2000) have proposed a way to analyze the several
The multimedia learning system
To evaluate the previously described effects in an English learning system for Brazilian students, we developed a multimedia CALL system specifically for this study. In this section, we describe the design of the CALL system (Section 3.1) and of the APA (Section 3.2).
Evaluation study
The goal of the present study is to evaluate how the agent effects proposed by Atkinson and his colleagues impact learning. Specifically, we aim at finding evidence on whether the presence of the agent on the screen (i.e., the image effect), the student–instructor relationship simulated by the agent (i.e., the embodied agent effect), the instruction delivered orally by the agent instead of textually (i.e., the modality effect), and the use of gestures, locomotion, and gazes by the agent (i.e.,
Results
This section presents the results obtained in the experiment. Section 5.1 describes the results from the pre- and posttests, while results from the effects appear in Section 5.2, and outcomes of the questionnaire in Section 5.3.
Discussions
This section analyzes the results presented in the previous section. In particular, we aim to discuss whether the results from the experiment confirm the existence of the four abovementioned APA effects — namely, the image effect, embodied agent effect, modality effect, and expressiveness effect — in CALL systems. In addition, we also discuss what can be concluded from the evaluation of the four effects in the same learning system.
Conclusion
The goal of this study was to investigate the image effect, embodied agent effect, modality effect, and expressiveness effect of APAs in the learning of English as a foreign language. To verify how these effects impact learning, we integrated three versions of an APA into a CALL system developed specifically for this research, resulting in four different versions of the CALL system.
The effects were analyzed by comparisons across the four versions of the system: image effect (voice-only versus
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