The effectiveness of a pedagogical agent-based learning system for teaching word recognition to children with moderate mental retardation: Colloquium

The effectiveness of a pedagogical agent-based learning system for teaching word recognition to children with moderate mental retardation has been discussed. Studies have indicated that computer-assisted learning is useful in helping people with cognitive impairments to learn effectively. Pedagogical agents have been proposed as an approach to make computer based learning effective and support it by providing user friendly interfaces, multimodal dialogues and proper guiding. They have also high potential for reducing cognitive loading and enhancing motivation for learners. The effectiveness of learning the vocabulary can be increased by using stimulus fading strategies, namely internal stimulus and external stimulus fading. These are effective in teaching word recognition to children with moderate retardation. Children with moderate retardation may suffer attention deficiency when they are required to concentrate on the two stimuli and are likely to pay more attention to the pictures than the words.