Abstract
In a traditional classroom environment, instructor enthusiasm has been shown to enhance student’s emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. Additionally, emotional response theory argues that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of an instructor will induce positive emotional states in learners, which in turn, enact learners’ approach behaviours in the learning process. Therefore, should a pedagogical agent convey enthusiastic behaviours in a multimedia learning environment? Literature and theoretical reviews offer two competing views. The first view, based on emotional response theory, predicts that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of a pedagogical agent can induce higher positive emotions in learners, which in turn, enhance affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. However, the second view, based on cognitive load theory, suggests that pedagogical agent enthusiasm may increase extraneous cognitive load (additional processing in the mind), which negatively impact emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. To investigate the effects of agent enthusiasm, seventy-two university freshmen interacted with either an enthusiastic agent or a neutral agent (operationalized through vocal tones, facial expression, gestures, and remarks) that simulates the instructional role of a virtual tutor that delivers narrative demonstrations on how to predict the outputs of C-Programming algorithms. The results of our study showed that pedagogical agent enthusiasm significantly enhanced emotion, intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions, and cognitive outcome. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that the facilitating effects of agent enthusiasm on intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions of the learning environment, and affective perceptions of the pedagogical agent were fully mediated by a learner’s positive emotion, thus demonstrating that the framework of emotional response theory can be applied to learner-agent interaction in a multimedia learning environment. Implications and suggestions for future research related to pedagogical agent enthusiasm are discussed in this paper.
Highlights
Pedagogical agents are animated characters that are embedded in virtual learning environments
The social agency theory is supported by findings of a recent meta-analysis; it was revealed that learners achieved more from multimedia learning system with a pedagogical agent than a system without an agent
Effects of agent enthusiasm on positive emotion An independent-samples t test was conducted to compare the average scores of the positive affect scale (PAS) between participants in enthusiastic agent and neutral agent conditions
Summary
Pedagogical agents are animated characters that are embedded in virtual learning environments. Advances in multimedia have allowed pedagogical agents to express synthetic emotions and nonverbal behaviours [4]. These advances open up a myriad of potential social learning benefits, due to the simulated socio-emotive relationships between learners and computer agents [5, 6]. Research has shown that pedagogical agents should emulate human-like qualities, such that an agent voice should be narrated by a human voice rather than a computersynthesized voice [7, 8] Beyond this fact, research related to agent’s teaching and instructional styles is still scant [3]. Should pedagogical agents act enthusiastically and passionately about a particular subject? Can pedagogical agents transfer enthusiasm to students and improve their perceptions of and attitudes toward the subject being taught and the agent itself?
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