“Thanks Alisha, Keep in Touch”: Gender Effects and Engagement with Virtual Learning Companions

Pezzullo, Lydia G.; Wiggins, Joseph B.; Frankosky, Megan Hardy; Min, Wookhee; Boyer, Kristy Elizabeth; Mott, Bradford W.; Wiebe, Eric N.; Lester, James C.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-61425-0_25

Cited by 15 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…These measures include the interest in a task or a domain, (e.g., “I will take a hard sciences course as an elective,” Rosenberg-Kima et al, 2008 ), beliefs about the utility of a task or a domain (e.g., “I would have many good career opportunities if I was a hard science major,” Plant et al, 2009 ), learners' self-efficacy as in feeling capable of performing a task (e.g., “I can achieve high grades in math,” Kim and Wei, 2011 ), learners' self-regulation to regulate their behaviors to succeed in a task (e.g., “I kept track of my progress,” Baylor and Kim, 2004 ), learners' motivation assessed with the Situational Motivation Scale (SIMS) (Guay et al, 2000 ) which includes 16 items about the motivation to work on tasks (e.g., “Because I am doing it for my own good,” Krämer et al, 2016 ), learners' enjoyment (e.g., “How much did you enjoy preparing for the exam?,” Shiban et al, 2015 ), their perceived learning effectiveness (e.g., “I gained a good understanding of the basic concepts of the materials,” Sajjadi et al, 2020 ), and their mental demand to know how much mental and perceptual activity was required (thinking, deciding, calculating, etc. ), e.g., “Was the task easy or demanding?” (Hart and Staveland, 1988 ; Pezzullo et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Systematic Review Of Virtual Agents' Gender and Its Impact O...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Armando

Ochs

Régner

2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

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Virtual learning environments often use virtual characters to facilitate and improve the learning process. These characters, known as pedagogical agents, can take on different roles, such as tutors or companions. Research has highlighted the importance of various characteristics of virtual agents, including their voice or non-verbal behaviors. Little attention has been paid to the gender-specific design of pedagogical agents, although gender has an important influence on the educational process. In this article, we perform an extensive review of the literature regarding the impact of the gender of pedagogical agents on academic outcomes. Based on a detailed review of 59 articles, we analyze the influence of pedagogical agents' gender on students' academic self-evaluations and achievements to answer the following questions: (1) Do students perceive virtual agents differently depending on their own gender and the gender of the agent? (2) Does the gender of pedagogical agents influence students' academic performance and self-evaluations? (3) Are there tasks or academic situations to which a male virtual agent is better suited than a female virtual agent, and vice versa, according to empirical evidence? (4) How do a virtual agent's pedagogical roles impact these results? (5) How do a virtual agent's appearance and interactive capacities impact these results? (6) Are androgynous virtual agents a potential solution to combatting gender stereotypes? This review provides important insight to researchers on how to approach gender when designing pedagogical agents in virtual learning environments.

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Section: Systematic Review Of Virtual Agents' Gender and Its Impact O...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Armando

Ochs

Régner

2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

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“…Learning companions can serve a key motivational function, which can be moderated by many factors such as gender. For example, a recent study found that a learning companion deeply integrated into the narrative of a game-based learning environment produced experiences that were significantly more engaging for girls than for boys compared to a learning companion without the same backstory and personality, even holding task support constant and controlling for learners' prior knowledge and video game experience (Pezzullo et al 2017). In addition to "pure" learning companions, some learning companions provide both a cognitive and social role.…”

Section: Roles For Pedagogical Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedagogical Agents: Back to the Future

Johnson

Lester

2018

AI Magazine

Self Cite

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Back in the 1990s we started work on pedagogical agents, a new user interface paradigm for interactive learning environments. Pedagogical agents are autonomous characters that inhabit learning environments and can engage with learners in rich, face-to-face interactions. Building on this work, in 2000 we, together with our colleague, Jeff Rickel, published an article on pedagogical agents that surveyed this new paradigm and discussed its potential. We made the case that pedagogical agents that interact with learners in natural, life-like ways can help learning environments achieve improved learning outcomes. This article has been widely cited, and was a winner of the 2017 IFAAMAS Award for Influential Papers in Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS, 2017). On the occasion of receiving the IFAAMAS award, and after twenty years of work on pedagogical agents, we decided to take another look at the future of the field. We’ll start by revisiting our predictions for pedagogical agents back in 2000, and examine which of those predictions panned out. Then, informed what we have learned since then, we will take another look at emerging trends and the future of pedagogical agents. Advances in natural language dialogue, affective computing, machine learning, virtual environments, and robotics are making possible even more lifelike and effective pedagogical agents, with potentially profound effects on the way people learn.

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Predicting Dialogue Breakdown in Conversational Pedagogical Agents with Multimodal LSTMs

Min

Park

Wiggins

et al. 2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“Thanks Alisha, Keep in Touch”: Gender Effects and Engagement with Virtual Learning Companions

Cited by 15 publications

References 17 publications

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Pedagogical Agents: Back to the Future

Predicting Dialogue Breakdown in Conversational Pedagogical Agents with Multimodal LSTMs

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