The Impact of Animated and Static Pedagogical Agents on Students’ Learning Achievement in an Introductory Psychology Course

Abstract

The use of a Pedagogical Agent (PA) to promote multimedia learning comes in various multimedia designs. Many PA designs from prior studies are found to exist without the combination of animation, human recorded voice, interactivity, and narration. In the current study, two interactive multimedia modules (IMMs) were developed, comprising two diferent types of PAs, namely animated PA (APA) with emotive responses and static PA (SPA) designs. Both IMMs conveyed the fundamental of psychology lessons to students. At the end of the intervention, a set of achievement tests was used to measure students’ learning achievement in Introductory Psychology knowledge acquisition. This study is to compare students’ learning achievement between APA and SPA groups in Introductory Psychology through a two-group posttest only experimental design. Thirty-two participants were recruited and equally allocated to APA and SPA groups to interact with the two diferent types of PA designs in the learning modules. The research fndings corroborate the hypothesis that learning through the use of APA with animated characters and spoken text/recorded voice features is more efective than SPA with static characters and written text features in acquiring Introductory Psychology knowledge.