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...

This paper presents findings of a pilot study which used pedagogical agents to examine disclosure in educational settings. The study used responsive evaluation to explore how use of pedagogical agents might affect students’ truthfulness and disclosure by asking them to respond to a lifestyle choices survey delivered by a webbased pedagogical agent. Findings indicate that emotional connection wi...

Feedback is a crucial element in the learning process and it can be quite challenging to provide the right feedback upon which students can act upon to improve their learning. Providing proper feedback is even more challenging in contemporary educational environments due the presence of a number of factors such as: changing expectations of students, variety of teaching modes, etc. Our objective...

This paper describes two affect-sensitive variants of an existing intelligent tutoring system called AutoTutor. The new versions of AutoTutor detect learners’ boredom, confusion, and frustration by monitoring conversational cues, gross body language, and facial features. The sensed cognitive-affective states are used to select AutoTutor’s pedagogical and motivational dialogue moves and to drive...