Design Recommendations for Adaptive Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Authoring

Pedagogical agents hold great promise for enhancing the learning experience of students within intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). There is mounting evidence that ITSs lead to improved student learning (Beal, Walles, Arroyo, & Woolf, 2007; Schroeder, Adesope, & Gilbert, 2013) and in some cases have been found to be nearly as effective as one-on-one human tutoring (VanLehn, 2011). The timely and customized advice of ITSs may be further enhanced by the addition of pedagogical agents embodied as virtual characters that have the ability to motivate students while simultaneously providing complementary feedback through deictic gestures, motions, and utterances (Lester, Voerman, Towns, & Callaway, 1999; Rus, D’Mello, Hu, & Graesser, 2013). Advancing the case for employing pedagogical agents in tutoring systems is the increase in availability of game engines and graphics hardware capable of rendering lifelike virtual characters with significantly reduced development effort (Petridis et al., 2012).