A courseware has been developed in our project to assist Taiwan elementary school teachers to edit animated pedagogical agent based multimedia materials. This courseware provides an authoring tool for teachers as well as a learning system for elementary students. The results of evaluation revealed that majority of teachers and students agreed that the courseware is helpful and able to enhance the e-learning achievements of elementary students. The students’ learning outcomes also confirmed that the courseware is indeed able to significantly improve the students’ learning performance. When the elementary school teachers use the courseware to edit the e-learning materials, we would like to assess whether the storytelling impacts the effectiveness of learners’ performance and to explore whether the narration flow of “linear” or “branch” helps students in learning. To this end, this study applies the authoring tool to design three different modes of e-learning materials and analyzes the differentiation of modes. Three modes are ‘linear with no narration’, ‘linear narration’, and ‘branching narration’. The evidence showed that material represented in story contributes to memorization and comprehension of students in learning activity, but no evidence found in this research to reveal that narration flow can improve learning performance although branching narration mode contributes the highest means of post-test achievement.
