Some economist educators are lecturing less, and making use of teaching techniques that engage students more actively. Here we discuss a number of pedagogical strategies that do just that, with the aim of encouraging critical thinking on controversial economic issues. The three specific examples discussed in the paper are 1) a simulation to model the different social locations of various econom...

While many aspects of tutoring have been identified and studied, off topic conversation has been largely ignored. In this paper, off topic conversation during 50 hours of one-to-one expert tutoring sessions was analyzed. Two distinct methodologies (Dialogue Move occurrence and LIWC analysis) were used to determine the anatomy of off topic conversation. Both analyses revealed that the expected s...

We evaluated a pedagogical agent that coaches collaborative problem solving by tracking student participation and comparing students' individual and group solutions. The software coach encourages negotiation when differences are detected between solutions, and encourages participation in other ways. Evaluations based on expert judgment and on students’ behavior shows that the quality of the adv...

The Eastern cultural tradition, together with other social factors, has shaped a group-based, teacher-dominated, and centrally organized pedagogical culture. Drawing upon this cultural perspective, this article reviews the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) in Eastern schools, including ICT planning and management, hardware infrastructures, software resources and se...

Schools as social institutions are resistant to change, and the introduction of ICT (information and communication technologies) into classrooms has not yet created fundamental changes in learning and teaching in public schooling in general. Findings from international comparative studies have shown that educational innovations leveraging the potentials of technology have taken place in schools...

Research has shown that learning programs with well designed animated virtual pedagogical agents engage and motivate students, produce greater reported satisfaction and enjoyment by students, and produce greater learning gains than programs without these agents. How to design an animated virtual pedagogical agent behaves much like a sensitive and effective human tutor is a very challenge work t...

We have developed an affective behavior model for intelligent tutoring systems that considers both the affective and knowledge state of the student to generate tutorial actions. The affective behavior model was designed based on teachers’ expertise obtained through a survey which 11 math teachers participated. The study focused in knowing how teachers manage the affective state of the students ...

This study examined the potential of pedagogical agents as learning companions (PALs) to build social relations with learners and, consequently, to motivate learning. The study investigated the impact of PAL affect (positive vs. negative vs. neutral), PAL gender (male vs. female), and learner gender (male vs. female) on learners’ social judgments, motivation, and learning in a controlled experi...

Due to the new possibilities they open up for collaborative writing in education, wikis have received much attention the last few years. As a result, teachers have used wikis to achieve various educational purposes, such as wikis for online courses, teacher evaluation, or class project. However, the novelty and popularity of a technology do not automatically imply its suitability in educational...

This study investigated the effects of a pedagogical agent that cued relevant information in a story-based instructional animation on the cardiovascular system. Based on cognitive load theory, it was expected that the experimental condition with the pedagogical agent would facilitate students to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, and therefore lead to higher learning outco...