The Role of Agent Age and Gender for Middle-Grade Girls

Compared to boys, many girls are more aware of a social context in the learning process and perform better when the environment supports frequent interactions and social relationships. For these girls, embodied agents (animated on-screen characters acting as tutors) could afford simulated social interactions in computer-based learning and thereby supply a girl-friendly instructional context. This study examined the effects of the age and gender of an agent on ninth-grade Caucasian and ethnic-minority girls' perceptions of the agent, mathematics attitudes, and learning in a computer-based algebra-learning environment. In general, the findings support that a virtual agent plays both social and instructional roles that favor teenage girls and could be a viable tool to create a favorable context for girls learning challenging topics.