Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

645

Date

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Psychology

Committee Chair

Arthur C. Graesser

Committee Member

Andrew Olney

Committee Member

Michael Grant

Abstract

This thesis investigated the effect that ethnicity and gender of animated pedagogical agents (APAs) has on preference and perception by participatns. It was hypothosized that participants would choose to work with and give more favorable ratings to those agents who most resemble themselves. Ratings of four professor agents, an African American male and female and a Caucasian male and female, were collected from 120 workers on Mechanical Turk, an online crowd sourcing marketplace. Ethnicity and gender of the agents were externally validated before use in the study. Results indicated that users did not prefer agents who were indentical to themselves. Instead, the results followed trends of previous research in the stereotyping research on students' ratings of professors. Results indicated that stereotypes for African American and Caucasian professors may be more of a guiding factor in participants' feelings towards APAs.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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