Simulating Instructional Roles through Pedagogical Agents

By Amy L. Baylor, Yanghee Kim. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2005

396 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper describes the design and empirical validation of three distinct pedagogical agent roles (Expert, Motivator, and Mentor) for college students within the MIMIC (Multiple Intelligent Mentors Instructing Collaboratively) agent-based research environment. The pedagogical agent roles were operationalized by image, animation, affect, voice and script, and were developed in Poser 4 and implemented via Microsoft Agent. Two controlled experiments validated the instantiation of the three roles according to learner perception (N=78) and actual impact on motivation and learning (N=71). The results confirmed that the agent roles were not only perceived by the students to reflect their intended purposes but also led to significant changes in learning and motivation, as designed. Specifically, the Expert agent led to increased information acquisition, the Motivator led to increased self-efficacy, and the Mentor led to overall improved learning and motivation. The implications for intelligent tutoring and multi-agent system design and development is discussed.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/482009321091c83fb7096e83c4c243533376908b

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Citations in the corpus

Equity Beyond Bias in Language Technologies for Education (2019, background): “When these pedagogical agents are used with students, regardless of if they play the role of tutors, coaches, or peers (Baylor and Kim, 2005), representation matters.”
Teachable Agents and the Protégé Effect: Increasing the Effort Towards Learning (2009, background): “Similarly, Baylor and Kim (2005) found that pedagogical agents equipped with encouraging dialogue were perceived as more motivating and showed a moderate trend for enhancing student self-efficacy.”
Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs) as a Bridge Between Engineering Education Research and Mathematics Education Research (2008, background): “Avatars that can supply information, coach teams and organize progress are likely to expand the scope of implementation of MEAs, simply by providing some content-rich and anthropomorphically-credible accompaniment to groups [91, 92].”
Virtual Customer Service Agents: Using Social Presence and Personalization to Shape Online Service Encounters (2014, background): “Baylor & Kim (2005) found that expert agents are able to elicit feelings of human warmth, and therefore feelings of social presence.”
An embodied agent helps anxious students in mathematics learning (2017, background): “Over the last two decades, researchers from various disciplines have examined the impact of embodied agents on learners’ affect and learning gains (Atkinson, 2002; Baylor & Kim, 2005; Dunsworth & Atkinson, 2007; Kim & Wei, 2011; Moreno, Mayer, Spires, & Lester, 2001; Wang et al., 2008).”
The Use of Immersive Virtual Reality in the Learning Sciences: Digital Transformations of Teachers, Students, and Social Context (2008, background): “Virtual agents not only allow a user to enter into a learning experience at his or her own convenience, but they can also provide personalized one-on-one learning experiences tailored to the individual that would be prohibitively expensive otherwise (Baylor & Kim, 2005).”
A Social-Cognitive Framework for Pedagogical Agents as Learning Companions (2006, background): “It is also noted, however, that learners' showing increased self-efficacy after working with weak agents has been replicated consistently in other studies (Baylor & Kim, 2004, 2005).”
Examining the relationship among student perception of support, course satisfaction, and learning outcomes in online learning (2011, background): “Scaffolding (Ge & Land, 2003), cognitive tutors (Koedinger & Corbett, 2006), apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989), and pedagogical agents (Baylor & Kim, 2005) are often used to support student learning.”
Do pedagogical agents make a difference to student motivation and learning (2011, background): “While their supporters expect them to foster learner motivation and learning outcomes due to the social cues they provide (e.g., Atkinson, 2002; Baylor & Kim, 2005; Craig et al., 2002; Johnson et al., 2000), others express concerns that they may distract the learner from the learning content (Dehn…”
The Effects of Culturally Congruent Educational Technologies on Student Achievement (2013, background): “[25], who found that varying agent age, gender, and ethnicity (including African American) affected both student perceptions of the agent’s intelligence, and their learning.”