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Experimental Evaluation of Affective Embodied Agents in an Information Literacy Game

Published: 19 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Digital game-based learning (DGBL) has become increasingly popular. With elements such as narratives, rewards, quests, and interactivity, DGBL can actively engage learners, stimulating desired learning outcomes. In an effort to increase its appeal, affective embodied agents (EAs) have been incorporated as learning companions or instructors in DGBL. However, claims about the efficacy of using affective EAs in DGBL have scarcely been subjected to empirical analysis. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of affective EAs on students' learning outcome, motivation, perceived usefulness, and behavioral intention in an information literacy (IL) game. Eighty tertiary students were recruited and randomly assigned in a pre- and post-test between-subjects experiment with two conditions: affective-EA and no-EA. Results showed that participants benefited from interacting with the affective EA in the IL game in terms of attention, confidence, satisfaction, and intention to learn IL knowledge and to recommend. However, there were no significant differences in learning outcome, relevance, or intention to play the game. Contributions and limitations of this study are also discussed at the end.

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  • (2022)Older Adults’ Interaction With Intelligent Virtual Assistants: The Role of Information Modality and FeedbackInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2022.207466739:5(1162-1183)Online publication date: 30-May-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
JCDL '16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE-CS on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
June 2016
316 pages
ISBN:9781450342292
DOI:10.1145/2910896
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 June 2016

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Author Tags

  1. affective embodied agent
  2. digital game-based learning
  3. educational games
  4. game evaluation
  5. information literacy education.

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JCDL '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 15 of 52 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 415 of 1,482 submissions, 28%

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  • (2023)A Scoping Review of Heuristics in Videos Games Research: Definitions, Development, Application, and OperationalisationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36110357:CHI PLAY(402-424)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Older Adults’ Interaction With Intelligent Virtual Assistants: The Role of Information Modality and FeedbackInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2022.207466739:5(1162-1183)Online publication date: 30-May-2022

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