VRacter: Investigating Character-Based Avatar Preference in Education

Abstract

Finding the best match for students and teachers is seen as a very promising way to maximise the learning gain and enhance the learning experience in any prestigious educational institute. Character, i.e. traits that distinguish between individuals, such as personality, are a key aspect in any human interaction, including student-teacher ones. Character defines how a person behaves given a specific situation. In the current paper, we focus on students in a virtual learning environment with a teacher avatar embodying a specific teaching style and the resulting learning gain. The main research question is how certain character components of the student affect his/her learning gain given the different situations (teachers with different styles). Using a controlled yet customizable environment such as virtual reality is well suited for investigating this fit between different teacher and student styles. This paper investigates the relation between different embodiments of pedagogical agent characters and the students’ personalities in reference to their gain of knowledge. The different agent characters are embodied through body language and speech style, modeled through different movement animations and the pace and tone of speech. The learning gain of each student resulting from attending two short VR lectures for two virtual teachers with different teaching styles is calculated and related to the student’s personality.