The Impact of Student Individual Differences and Visual Attention to Pedagogical Agents During Learning with Metatutor

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between students' (N = 28) individual differences and visual attention to pedagogical agents (PAs) during learning with MetaTutor, a hypermedia-based intelligent tutoring systems. We used eye tracking to capture visual attention to the PAs, and our results reveal specific visual attention-related metrics (e.g., fixation rate, longest fixations) that are significantly influenced by learning depending on student achievement goals. Specifically, performance-oriented students learned more with a long longest fixation and a high fixation rate on the PAs, whereas mastery-oriented students learned less with a high fixation rate on the PAs. Our findings contribute to understanding how to design PAs that can better adapt to student achievement goals and visual attention to the PA.