Pedagogical Agent Gestures to Improve Learner Comprehension of Abstract Concepts in Hints

In most Intelligent Tutoring Systems, the help messages (hints) are not very clear for students as they are only presented textually and have little connection with the task elements. This can lead to students' undesired behaviors, like gaming the system, associated with low performance. In this paper, the authors aim at evaluating if the gestures of an animated pedagogical agent to explain hints related to equation solving improves the students' understanding of these help messages. With this goal, they developed an animated pedagogical agent that uses gestures coupled with messages to explain hints in an algebra tutor. The authors performed a qualitative pilot study with four students to verify the impact of using gestures by the animated pedagogical agent on the comprehension of the hints, using two different versions of the system. The difference between these versions was the availability of gestures by the agent. The results showed that students understood the hints provided by the agent more correctly when they were coupled with agent's gesture. Furthermore, they also preferred using the tutor version with gestures.