My name is Gustav Petersen, and I will be presenting my paper called Pedagogical agents
in educational VR: An in the wild study We know from research that learning doesn’t
only involve cognitive processes.
It’s also an inherently social process that involves social exchanges between people.
But as more and more learners move away from the physical classroom and into the digital
classroom, we risk losing the social element, which could hinder learning.
This problem also extends to my field of study, which is learning via virtual reality headsets.
And one solution could be to include virtual people during virtual learning, as some scholars
think that humans treat computerized people like real people.
This is called the media equation.
In this study, we manipulated the presence of a virtual instructor during a virtual reality
lesson to understand social interactions in the virtual classroom better.
Social agency theory identifies social presence as the psychological result of using virtual
instructors.
According to this theory, social presence leads to more learning, as the learner will
work hard to understand the speaker’s message.
Social agency theory also identifies the design of virtual instructors as a way of increasing
social presence and thereby learning.
The experiment had five conditions in total.
Four of these included virtual instructors designed with different combinations of high
and low visual and behavioral realism: high behavioral realism meant that the agent displayed
natural movements whereas low behavioral realism meant that it remained static.
High visual realism meant that the agent looked like a female museum tour guide whereas low
visual realism meant it was in monochrome.
There was also a control condition which only included the virtual instructor’s voice.
Our participants were 161 oculus quest owners who were recruited online via mostly Reddit
and installed the application on their own devices.
Most of the participants were young males located in the U.S. who identified as expert
VR users.
When starting the application, a pre-test assessed their prior knowledge about viral
diseases.
This was followed by the core learning material about measles, zika, and covid-19, taught
by one of the five virtual instructors.
Afterwards a post-test measured their knowledge again and collected subjective measures.
On average, all participants improved their factual and conceptual knowledge about viral
diseases and enjoyed the experience.
However, there were some interesting learning differences based on the virtual instructor’s
appearance.
As can be seen, virtual instructors actually risked leading to less factual learning such
as learning about numbers and figures: There were main effects of both appearance and behavior,
which means that instructors of high visual and behavioral realism were significantly
worse than control.
This was not the case for conceptual learning, as can be seen on the next graph.
Learning about concepts and theories was in some cases slightly better in the presence
of a virtual instructor (although the difference was not very large).
There was also a significant crossover interaction effect between appearance and behavior.
This meant that the effect of visual realism on conceptual learning reversed depending
on the level of behavioral realism.
Looking at the participants’ experience of social presence, adding virtual people
to the environment did not make that much of a difference.
In general, the levels of social presence were low.
Only participants who interacted with virtual instructors of high behavioral realism experienced
slightly higher levels of social presence.
As predicted by theory, these findings indicate that realistically behaving pedagogical agents
do lead to more social presence.
Contrary to theoretical claims, though, this doesn’t lead to more learning.
In general, we found that virtual instructors are not ideal for learning about numbers and
figures, most likely because it requires a lot of mental resources, and minimal distraction
is therefore preferable.
Next steps for research on this topic could be to use virtual instructors for other types
of learning, such as learning complicated procedures rather than declarative knowledge.
Learning by observing other people perform is a well-established phenomenon in educational
psychology and could very well transfer to virtual people as well.
Thank you