Effects of pedagogical agents' instructional roles on learners with different cognitive styles in terms of achievem:ent and motivation
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Date
2010
Authors
Kok Keong, Foo
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Abstract
This study investigated the effects of pedagogical agents' instructional roles
m an interactive agent-based multimedia learning environment on learners with
different cognitive styles in terms of achievement and motivation.
Two modes of pedagogical agent with different instructional roles, namely,
the Expert Agent (EXA) and the Mentor Agent (MEA), were systematically designed
and developed to serve the purpose of this study. The EXA was designed to present
direct and accurate information when questions were asked by the learners. Whereas
the MEA was designed to provide sufficient guidance for learners to search for
information, rather than giving the information directly when questions were asked
by the learners. Occasionally, the MEA would provide words of motivation and
encouragement to the learners to engage their involvement towards the learning task.
This true-experimental study employed a 2 x 2 factorial design by taking the
two modes of pedagogical agent with different instructional roles (EXA and MEA)
as the independent variable, and the learners' cognitive styles of fielddependence/
field-independence (FD/FI) as the moderator variable. The dependent
variables were the learners' achievement score and motivation score. A total of 86
fourth-year undergraduate students from the School ofEducational Studies Universiti
Sains Malaysia, who enrolled in the 'PGT436E: ICT in Education' course,
participated in this study as the research sample. The learners were randomly
assigned to one of the pedagogical agents (EXA or MEA) and were requested to
study the instructional materials provided in the agent-based multimedia learning
portal by interacting with their assigned pedagogical agent.
Descriptive and inferential statistics were performed to analyse the collected
data. The analyses revealed that learners who were facilitated by the MEA performed
significantly better compared to those who were facilitated by the EXA in both
achievement and motivation. When the learners' cognitive styles were taken into
consideration,, the greatest impact of the MEA was observed on the FD learners -
whereby FD learners who used the MEA outperformed those FD learners who used
the EXA significantly in both achievement and motivation. Among the FI learners,
learners who used the MEA were significantly more motivated compared to those
who used the EXA. But, no significance difference was identified in the mean of
achievement score between the learners who used the MEA and the learners who
used the EXA. These results implied that the mentor instructional role is preferable
over the expert instructional role when designing pedagogical agents for multimedia
learning environments.
Description
Keywords
Pedagogical agents , Cognitive styles