The influence of using affective tutoring system in accounting remedial instruction on learning performance and usability

•An affective tutoring system (ATS) for the Accounting remedial course is proposed.•How the effects to enhance motivation and learning performance are examined.•Our ATS has emotion recognition, tutor, content, and strategy modules.•The benefits of ATS for Accounting are good usability and high learning performance.

Current research on computerized learning has steered toward combining personalized e-learning with an affective tutoring system (ATS) to enable assisted teaching and strengthen students’ learning effectiveness. This study develops a novel ATS which includes four modules: affective recognition (combines facial emotion recognition and semantic emotion recognition), tutor agent, content, and instruction strategies for examining the influence of ATS in Accounting remedial instruction on learning effectiveness and usability. Triangulation research methods—quantitative data (questionnaire survey and score) and qualitative data (participant observation and interview) have adopted in this study to evaluate the students’ learning performance and system usability. This study recruited 80 students (40 students for traditional teaching group, 40 students for ATS group) from a technology university in Southern Taiwan who attained low academic achievements in Accounting and possess business backgrounds. The research results revealed that the benefits of using the ATS for Account remedial curriculum are good usability of system and high learning performance. Finally, we proposed several prospects for future study.