Research on animated pedagogical agents (agents) is viewed as a very positive attempt to introduce more pedagogical support and motivational elements into multi-media instruction. Yet, existing empirical studies that examine the learning benefits of agents have had very mixed results, largely due to the way that they are designed. This paper will suggest five design principles for future resear...

This paper represents a summary of a research report and the results of developing an educational software, including a multi-agent system for teaching accounting bases and financial accounting. The paper describes the structure of the multi-agent system, defined as a complex network of s-agents. Each s-agent contains 6 pedagogical agents and a coordinator agent. We have defined a new architect...

We report on the reactions of males and females to the presence of animated agents that provided emotional or motivational feedback. One hundred (100) high school students used agents embedded in an Intelligent Tutoring System for Mathematics and randomized controlled evaluations compared students with and without learning companions. Positive results indicate that affective pedagogical agents ...

A previous study showed that pedagogical agents that offer feedback with appropriate politeness strategies can help students learn better [21]. This work studied the Politeness Effect in a foreign language intelligent tutoring system, and provided further evidence that tutorial feedback with socially intelligent strategies can influence motivation and learning outcomes.

Emerging technologies, such as intelligent agents, avatars, and distributed environments offer new opportunities for the improvement of business games used for training decision makers. The advent of these technologies also creates new challenges to game developers and training consultants. We investigate these opportunities and offer suggestions on how to better address technical and pedagogic...

Our current enthusiasm for online education leaves unanswered a number of questions regarding the social interactions that mediate learning within these new environments. This paper explores some of these issues in relation both to the human participants and to the roles of pedagogical software agents in the electronic classroom.

This paper proposes a multi-agent system that provides a recommendation service of student tutors (or colleagues) for computational learning environments based in agents. The objective of this system is to motivate groups formation between students with pedagogical difficulties and colleagues who play the role of tutors. For such, it takes in consideration both the affective and the social aspe...