Designing pedagogical agents to evoke emotional states in online tutoring investigating the influence of animated characters

Abstract

The affective or emotional state of the learner is known to motivate learning, and this study specifically investigated the role of pedagogical agents with animated characteristics in an online tutoring task. Previous studies indicated that sensitivity to emotion typically varies depending on the gender of the learner and the gender of the teacher; therefore, we investigated how each type of emotion is influenced by the gender of the characters. We conducted three experiments with a total of 414 Japanese students. We found that both male and female learners felt more positive toward animated characters of the same gender, and the effects became stronger with childlike characteristics, such as big eyes. We conclude that deformed characters could be incorporated into designs of web-based tutoring systems for more effective teaching.