The relationship between emotions and learning was investigated by tracking the emotions that college students experienced while learning about computer literacy with AutoTutor. AutoTutor is an animated pedagogical agent that holds a conversation in natural language, with spoken contributions by the learner. Thirty students completed a multiple-choice pre-test, a 35-minute training session, and...

We present initial steps towards an interactive essay writing tutor that improves science knowledge by analyzing student essays for misconceptions and recommending science webpages that help correct those misconceptions. We describe the five components in this system: identifying core science concepts, determining appropriate pedagogical sequences for the science concepts, identifying student m...

This paper aims at the conception of an affective and animated pedagogical agent responsible for the interface of the environment with the student and for considering the affective aspects of the interaction with the student in a learning environment. The agent catches the student's affective state by his observable behavior, and applies tactics according to the student's affective state. We be...

There is a real need for studies on learning from multimedia with school-age children, even pre-school children. In this research, temporal speech cueing was proposed to help young children as they listened to a speaking pedagogical agent direct their attention to details in on-screen text and graphics. An experiment was conducted with 4th and 5th graders (n = 133) who read on-screen text, and ...

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...