Motivation Effect of Animated Pedagogical Agent’s Personality and Feedback Strategy Types on Learning in Virtual Training Environment

Abstract

Background: The personality and feedback of an animated pedagogical agent (APA) are vital social-emotional features that render the agent perceptually believable. The effect of them on learning in virtual training remains to be examined. Methods: In this paper, an explanation model was proposed to clarify the underlying mechanism of how these two features affect learners. Two studies were conducted to investigate the model. Study 1 reexamined the effect of APA’s personality type and feedback strategy on flow experience and performance, revealing significant effects of feedback strategy on flow and performance, as well as a marginal significant effect of personality type on performance. To explore the mechanism behind these effects, a theoretical model was proposed by distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation effect. Study 2 tested the model and round that the APA’s personality type significantly influences factors in the path of extrinsic motivation effect rather than those in the path of intrinsic motivation effect. Results: By contrast, feedback strategy significantly affected factors in the path of intrinsic motivation effect. Conclusions: The proposed model was supported by these results; further distinguishing the two motivation effects is necessary to understand the respective effects of an APA’s personality and feedback features on learning experiences and outcomes.

Keywords

• Human-centered computing
• Visualization
• Visualization design and evaluation methods