Synthetic relationships with Social Pedagogical Agents in education: a scoping literature review

In plain English

A PRISMA scoping review of 29 peer-reviewed studies from 2010 to 2025 maps how students form relationships with pedagogical agents — including virtual human tutors, virtual patients and VR avatars, alongside text and voice-only agents. It identifies eight design levers that shape relationship quality, among them voice and appearance, empathy expression, memory and consistency, and interaction duration, and finds that agents reliably improve social presence, affective support, trust and rapport. The caution for practitioners: relationship quality is an enabling condition, not an outcome — it raises motivation, effort and honesty rather than test scores, and most of the underlying evidence comes from short single-session experiments.