Investigating pedagogical agents' scaffolding of self-regulated learning in relation to learners' subgoals

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) incorporate pedagogical agents (PAs) to scaffold learners' self-regulated learning (SRL) via prompts and feedback to promote learners' monitoring and regulation of their cognitive, affective, metacognitive and motivational processes to achieve their (sub)goals. This study examines PAs' effectiveness in scaffolding and teaching SRL during learning with MetaTutor, an ITS on the human circulatory system. Undergraduates (N = 118) were randomly assigned to a condition: Control Condition (i.e. learners could only self-initiate SRL strategies) and Prompt and Feedback Condition (i.e. PAs prompted learners to engage in SRL). Learners' log-file data captured when strategies were used, the initiator of the strategy (i.e. learner and PA), and the relevance of instructional content pages in relation to learner subgoals. While results showed that PAs were effective scaffolders of SRL in which they prompted learners to engage in SRL strategies more when content was relevant towards their subgoals and as time on page and task increased, there were mixed findings about the effectiveness of PAs as teachers of SRL. Findings show how production rules guiding PA prompts can improve their scaffolding and teaching of SRL across the learning task – through contextualizing SRL strategies to the instructional content and in relation to the relevance of the content to learners' subgoals.