Effects of Seductive Augmentation and Agent Role on Learning Interest, Achievement, and Attitude

Learning interest plays an important role in the learning process, determining what to learn, and how to learn the chosen information. Based on the distinction between individual interest and situational interest, studies on seductive augmentation have mainly focused on instances in which students interact with a traditional computer screen interface, not with human-like agents. Consequently, the effects of seductive augmentation in an agent supported learning context where instructional messages are mediated by a pedagogical agent are largely unknown. Therefore the purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of seductive augmentation and agent role on learning interest, achievement, and attitude in pedagogical agent supported learning. 127 college undergraduate students enrolled in "Computer literacy" classes at a large public university were randomly assigned to the treatment groups. A two way MANOVA was performed to find the main effect of seductive graphics and seductive messages on learning interest and attitude. In addition, a two-way ANOVA was conducted to examine the effects of seductive graphics and seductive messages on the number of recalled keywords and comprehension test. To find the effect of specific agent role, the companion agent role condition and instructor agent role condition were compared. The results indicated that the use of seductive graphics and seductive messages was effective to improve learner's attention to the learning material in terms of learning interest, and also learner's attitude, especially relevance scores. However, no significant difference was found for the recall test and the comprehension test. The two different agent roles did not make any differences on the three dependent variables. The primary contribution of this study is twofold. First, the results of this study illuminate the concept of learning interest as it concerns seductive augmentation. Second, this study generalized the use of seductive augmentation in a multimedia learning context where a pedagogical agent is present. Further research is needed to examine the effects of seductive augmentation in different subject fields. Also the other aspect of situational interest, cognitive interest, needs to be studied since this study only implemented the concept of emotional interest.