Psychological Development and Education ›› 2025, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (6): 850-858.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2025.06.09

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Pedagogical Agent with Testing Interaction Could Facilitate Multimedia Learning

QIAO Peihua, CHENG Meixia, WANG Fuxing   

  1. Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079
  • Published:2025-11-05

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Abstract: Most of the previous studies on pedagogical agents focused on their effect by improving the attributes and characteristics of the agents themselves, but few studies explored the role of the interactive characteristics of the agents. Therefore, this study explored whether testing can be used as a feature of agent interaction to facilitate learning. The experiment used 2 (agent vs. without agent) × 2 (testing vs. restudy) between-subjects design to explore the effect of agent and testing on learning and subjective experience such as social presence, mental effort and learning motivation. The results showed that both agent and testing can effectively promote learning respectively. Learners in the agent-testing group performed best. The existence of agent improved learners’ social presence, mental effort, learning motivation and interest. Testing could improve learners’ social presence, mental effort and perceived material difficulty, and reduced learners’ interest and motivation. In the design of the practical instructional video, we should not only consider adding the image of the pedagogical agent, but also improve the interaction between the agent and the learners.

Key words: pedagogical agents, testing, multimedia learning, social presence, transfer performance

CLC Number: 

  • G442
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