How do you introduce an agent? - The effect of introduction type on how a teachable agent is experienced by students

Many studies have been, and are currently, conducted on how virtual agents should be designed and used for training and learning. In this paper we address the question of how such agents are introduced to users in systems and classroom settings, and the possible effect that have on how they are perceived, and the reactions and behavior that they invoke. We specifically investigated a system where students are expected to teach history to a virtual agent,i.e. teachable agent, and compared students that only got the system’s built in introduction to the agent and the narrative of the system, to students that in addition got a short verbal introduction in the classroom. We saw an effect of the additional verbal introduction in that those students to a significantly higher extent perceived the agent as someone who wanted to learn, and that these students self-reportedly made more effort and did not want to give up to a higher extent. Thus, we conclude that is important to further consider the effects of how agents are introduced to users both when designing systems as well as when designing and reporting experiments