Animated pedagogical agents effects on enhancing student motivation and learning in a science inquiry learning environment

This study focuses on the design and testing of a motivational animated pedagogical agent (APA) in an inquiry learning environment on kinematics. The aim of including the APA was to enhance students’ perceptions of task relevance and selfefficacy. Given the under-representation of girls in science classrooms, special attention was given to designing an APA that would appeal to the female students. A review of the literature suggested that the best design solution would be an agent who was female, young, attractive, and ‘‘cool’’. An experiment compared three conditions: agent (image and voice), voice (no image), and control (no image and no voice). The research question was whether students’ motivation and knowledge changed over time as they worked in the inquiry learning environment, and whether condition and gender affected such changes. Participants were 61 third-year students (mean age 14.7 years) from a secondary school. Gender was distributed evenly within and across conditions. A significant main effect of time on self-efficacy was found, with self-efficacy beliefs increasing significantly for both boys and girls. In addition, there was a significant interaction between time, condition, and gender for self-efficacy. About halfway during training, girls’ self-efficacy beliefs significantly increased in both experimental conditions and decreased in the control condition. & Hans van der Meij [email protected] Jan van der Meij [email protected] Ruth Harmsen [email protected] 1 Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS), Department of Instructional Technology, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands 2 Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS), ELAN, Institute for Teacher Education and Science Communication, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands 3 Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Teacher Education, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands 123 Education Tech Research Dev (2015) 63:381–403 DOI 10.1007/s11423-015-9378-5