Do learning styles influence the way students perceive interface agents?

This paper presents an interface agent, designed for a virtual learning environment, whose main capabilities are to communicate with users in natural language and to promote collaboration by inciting students to help each other. An experiment was carried out with 72 university students to assess the effectiveness of the interface agent regarding its ability to improve students’ performance, to influence students’ perception of their learning experience, and to involve students in collaborating with each other. Furthermore, the students were classified by their learning style, according to the Felder-Silverman model [6]. We then evaluated if different learning styles could produce different results because of the way students perceived the interface agent. The results of the experiment are presented here, as well as conclusions and direction for future work.