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Do students learn from video lessons presented by pedagogical agents of different racial and gender types equivalently to those delivered by a real human instructor? How do the race and gender of these agents impact students’ learning experiences and outcomes? In this between-subject design study, college students were randomly assigned to view a six 9-minute video lesson on chemical bonds, presented by pedagogical agents varying in gender (male, female) and race (Asian, Black, White), or to view the original lesson with a real human instructor. In comparing learning with a human instructor versus with a pedagogical agent of various races and genres, ANOVAs revealed no significant differences in learning outcomes (retention and transfer scores) or learner emotions, but students reported a stronger social connection with the human instructor over pedagogical agents. Students reported stronger positive emotions and social connections with female agents over male agents. Additionally, there was limited evidence of a race-matching effect, with White students showing greater positive emotion while learning with pedagogical agents of the same race. These findings highlight the limitations of pedagogical agents compared to human instructors in video lessons, while partially reflecting gender stereotypes and intergroup bias in instructor evaluations.
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From Doodles to Designs: Participatory Pedagogical Agent Design with Elementary Students
Participatory design practices create informed designs by bringing stakeholders into the design process early and often. This approach is a powerful tool, especially when the designer and the intended user are very different. This paper reports on work in which researchers co-design pedagogical agents to support collaborative computer science learning with elementary school students using an iterative drawing methodology. In the open drawing phase, students drew what they believe good collaboration looked like. Next, researchers analyzed those drawings under the requirements of the broader project and created a drawing scaffold (similar to a coloring book page). In the scaffolded drawing phase, students ideated within the more focused context. This process resulted in actionable design guidelines for the appearance of pedagogical agents.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1721000
- PAR ID:
- 10099601
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IDC '19
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 642 to 647
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Field trips are widely recognized as an essential educational component to connect classrooms with the real world. When students don’t have access to real field trips, virtual ones have been developed by educators and researchers. Pedagogical agents have been applied to serve as a tour guide and educational tool that facilitate students learning in a virtual learning environment. Such agents are computer software generated and controlled entities that replicate or emulate humans. Previous studies have found that adding anthropomorphic traits to pedagogical agents in learning environments has significantly improved students’ learning experience; however, this area has yet been explored in the context of a virtual construction field trip. In this study, a virtual field trip to a complex mechanical room was developed using 360-degree panoramas and a pedagogical agent was employed to lead the tour. This study focuses on one single anthropomorphic trait - deictic gestures, which are pointing gestures used to refer to specific objects – and explores how such trait affects students’ quantitative learning outcomes and feedbacks on four aspects of the agent, including facilitating learning, credibility, human-like, and engaging. It was found that deictic gestures can improve students’ learning performance and attitudes on multiple aspects of the agent.more » « less
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Abstract BackgroundElementary educators are increasingly asked to teach engineering design, motivating study of how they learn to teach this discipline. In particular, there is a need to examine how teachers reason about pedagogical situations and dilemmas in engineering—how they draw on their disciplinary understandings, attention to students' thinking, and pedagogical practices to support students' learning. Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of our qualitative study was to examine elementary teachers' pedagogical reasoning in an online graduate program. We asked: What stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? How do these stances shift over the course of the program? Design/MethodWe identified two teachers, Alma and Margaret, who exhibited productive shifts in their pedagogical reasoning during the program. Drawing on interviews and videos of their teaching, we developed case studies characterizing their stances toward teaching and learning engineering. ResultsAlma shifted in her reasoning about teaching the design process, from treating it as linear, discrete steps to recognizing the dynamic, overlapping nature of design practices. Similarly, Margaret shifted in how she reasoned about failure and iteration, recognizing the need to help students analyze unexpected design performances to learn from and iterate on their designs. For both teachers, these shifts were dynamic and nonlinear, reflecting both context‐sensitivity and growing stability in their reasoning. ConclusionsEngineering teacher educators should provide opportunities for teachers to reason about the specific pedagogical dilemmas in engineering and consider how teachers integrate disciplinary understandings with attention to students' reasoning and actions and pedagogical practices.more » « less
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With the urgent call for supporting science teachers to promote equity and justice through their daily work of teaching, there is a growing need for better understanding how science teachers come to engage in transformative teaching and learning that is equitably consequential. In this participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we created a professional learning context in which high school chemistry teachers engaged in a pedagogical imagining (Gutiérrez & Calabese Barton, 2015) by leveraging their teaching experiences, knowledge about students and communities, values, and concerns to create powerful learning contexts for Latinx and multilingual students from immigrant, low-income families. Drawing upon the perspective of learning as making and sharing of the world interwoven with making and sharing of selves (Warren et al, 2020), we analyzed teachers’ participations and discourses to examine teachers’ making and sharing that were equitably consequential. The findings illustrated three critical moments of teachers’ making and sharing where: (a) the teachers collectively developed shared pedagogical goals toward transformative learning while formulating agency, (b) the teachers and the researchers came to design a creative stoichiometry unit where students use chemistry to make their community better, and (c) the teachers came to be committed to being ‘intentional’ in their relational work to create a welcoming and safe learning environment using concrete pedagogical strategies. The analyses point out three design features of the professional learning context that were associated with the teachers’ consequential makings: (a) the use of a conceptual tool (i.e., ‘design principles’), (b) the power of “what if” discourses, and (c) creating a space for collective learning. Recommendations for designing professional learning context toward transformative teaching and learning are discussed.more » « less
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Pedagogical agents are virtual characters that instructional designers include in learning environments to help students learn. Research in the area has flourished for thirty years, yet there are still critical questions about the efficacy of pedagogical agents for influencing learning and affect. As such, we conducted an umbrella review to synthesize the field. We located 17 systematic reviews or meta-analyses focused on the use of pedagogical agents in educational settings. We found that agents can have small positive effects on learning, motivation, and other affective variables. However, we still cannot say how one should design a pedagogical agent for any given educational context. We highlight the limitations of existing theory in the area, as well as existing reviews from a practical and methodological perspective, and highlight productive areas for future research.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3325321
