Impact of Individual Differences on Affective Reactions to Pedagogical Agents Scaffolding

Students’ emotions are known to influence learning and motivation while working with agent-based learning environments (ABLEs). However, there is limited understanding of how Pedagogical Agents (PAs) impact different students’ emotions, what those emotions are, and whether this is modulated by students’ individual differences (e.g., personality, goal orientation). Such understanding could be used to devise intelligent PAs that can recognize and adapt to students’ relevant individual differences in order to enhance their experience with learning environments. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between individual differences and students’ affective reactions to four intelligent PAs available in MetaTutor, a hypermedia-based intelligent tutoring system. We show that achievement goals and personality traits can significantly modulate students’ affective reactions to the PAs. These findings suggest that students may benefit from personalized PAs that could adapt to their motivational goals and personality.