Supporting conceptual change in scientific inquiry learning via animated pedagogical agent

Animated pedagogical agent offers great promise in providing appropriate pedagogical interventions to learners in scientific inquiry learning environment. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of interventions by pedagogical agents in supporting conceptual change. The experiment was conducted within the INQPRO learning environment, leveraging on Decision Network as inference mechanism for decision making by the agent. The optimal intervention is selected by the agent and presented to learners. The empirical results demonstrated that 83.72% of participants who had interacted with the agent in the INQPRO learning environment achieved conceptual change. The promising result motivated the current study to design more effective pedagogical intervention component for fostering conceptual change.