ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1635465
The facts about the effects of pedagogical agents on learners' cognitive load: a meta-analysis based on 24 studies
Provisionally accepted
- 1Qiqihar University, Qiqihar, China
- 2College of Education, Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, China
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The role of pedagogical agents in multimedia learning as an element that gives students social cues to promote cognition has been demonstrated in terms of enhancing students' academic performance and intrinsic motivation. Cognitive load is an important factor in measuring the effectiveness of multimedia learning, but the results of pedagogical agents' effects on learners' cognitive load have been consistently inconsistent. In this study, a meta-analytical approach was used to comprehensively analyse 24 empirical studies to investigate the effects of pedagogical agents on students' cognitive load in multimedia learning and the moderating factors in their process. The results showed that the teaching agent only slightly reduced the cognitive load. Moderating analyses show that the pedagogical agent appearance, pedagogical agent role, subject domain, form of media mix, intervention duration, and learning pace play a moderating role in the process of the pedagogical agent's influence on cognitive load, and can significantly reduce the cognitive load of learners.
Keywords: multimedia learning1, cognitive load2, instructional design3, pedagogical agent4, Meta-analysis5
Received: 26 May 2025; Accepted: 11 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Zhang, Ding and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Guohua Wang, College of Education, Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, China
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