Abstract:

The Pedagogical Agent (PA) is an important topic in the e-learning environment. It’s defined as a virtual character presented on the interface to promote student learning. The key elements are the virtual character, the interface, and promoting learning. PA is widely discussed in academic papers; however, a complete analysis framework is not yet to be proposed owing to the diversity and complexity of the PA. This study, therefore, reviews the literature and proposes a list of related cues that include: environmental cues, learner cues, role cues, appearance cues, and social cues. Owing to culture difference, we use this list to review the actual research situation of PA in Taiwan and analyze their learning effectiveness. Using "Pedagogical Agent" as the main keywords, this research uses the "Airiti Library", "Web of Science", and other databases to search for related papers from 2009 to 2018. A total of 76 related Taiwanese papers were obtained. After the preliminary screening, 9 papers and 15 treatment designs were selected. Meta-analysis was performed with a random effect model (Hedges's g as the effect size). The results indicate that: First, the results of the average (Hedges's g) show that the effectiveness of the PA for learning is a small to medium effect (g = 0.453); second, the results of subgroup analysis (Hedges's g) show that regarding the impact of PA on learning effectiveness: role, appearance style and facial expression changes all have significant moderating effects. The study discussed the general situation of PAs research in Taiwan and the moderating effect of related clues and pointed out that the advantages of PA are supplemented by related theories.

Keywords:

Pedagogical Agent, meta-analysis, e-learning studies in Taiwan.