| The concept of Animated Pedagogical Agent(APA) is similar to the concept of Intelligent Pedagogical Agent(IPA) of research in our country, it refers to the anthropomorphic image or animated image providing a support for teaching objectives in the online learning environment. The function of APA in the learning process includes:presentation or modeling, provide guidance or scaffolding, provide information resources and so on.The results show that a large number of studies have shown the positive impact of APA on learning outcomes, but there is still a small number of studies have yielded no significant effect on the learning. With facing complex research results, we need summary research deficiencies and investigate the effect of APA on students' learning. At the same time, we put a second language learning which has less studies in the foreign research as a starting point to address three questions: 1.Whether APA has effect on second language learners in the process of reading comprehension and cognitive learning? 2.How did the researchers matched APA with learners in the process of learning? What is the effect? 3. What will happen to learners' performance and attitude to APA over time? In this study, we will use three experiments to explore the impact of APA on college students' English online reading. The first experiment is explore the differences of visual signal provided by APA and Arrow in the online reading environment. The second experiment is to discuss the influence of degree of matching APA with learners on learning outcomes in the online reading process. The third experiment is to examine the long-term effects of APA on learners' learning and attitude by comparing with the APA match group in the second experiment.The basic conclusions are:(1) In the process of college students' English online reading, the posttest of APA group and Arrow group outperformed the control group.(2) Compared with the control group condition, the participants of APA group and Arrow group show higher comments.(3) The degree of matching APA and learners have no significant effect on performance.(4) Students prefer to select the APA which is similar to themselves as a learning partner, this result is in line withSimilarity Attraction Theory.(5) Learner's performance has no significant change over time.(6) Learner's attitude has improved over time. At last, the study proposes some design strategies of APA to provide reference for online learning design. |
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