Exploring LLM-Powered Role and Action-Switching Pedagogical Agents for History Education in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This study develops and evaluates a VR-based history education system with LLM-powered adaptive role and action switching, enhancing social presence and perceived expertise, and providing design insights for future educational tools.

Contribution

Introduces a novel VR pedagogical agent system with adaptive role and action switching powered by LLMs, and empirically evaluates its effects on learning experience.

Findings

Adaptive role-switching improves perceived trustworthiness and expertise.

Adaptive action-switching increases social presence, humanness, and perceived expertise.

No significant effects on usability, motivation, or cognitive load.

Abstract

Multi-role pedagogical agents can create engaging and immersive learning experiences, helping learners better understand knowledge in history learning. However, existing pedagogical agents often struggle with multi-role interactions due to complex controls, limited feedback forms, and difficulty dynamically adapting to user inputs. In this study, we developed a VR prototype with LLM-powered adaptive role-switching and action-switching pedagogical agents to help users learn about the history of the Pavilion of Prince Teng. A 2 x 2 between-subjects study was conducted with 84 participants to assess how adaptive role-switching and action-switching affect participants' learning outcomes and experiences. The results suggest that adaptive role-switching enhances participants' perception of the pedagogical agent's trustworthiness and expertise but may lead to inconsistent learning experiences. Adaptive action-switching increases participants' perceived social presence, expertise, and humanness. The study did not uncover any effects of role-switching and action-switching on usability, learning motivation, and cognitive load. Based on the findings, we proposed five design implications for incorporating adaptive role-switching and action-switching into future VR history education tools.