V Sammanfattning VII List of Included Papers IX Other Work by the Respondent XII CHAPTER 1: VIRTUAL EMBODIED PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS 1 Virtual embodied pedagogical agents 1 CHAPTER 2: VIRTUAL PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS – A SHORT HISTORICAL RÉSUMÉ 5 Knowledge systems and artifi cial intelligence 5 User modelling 7 Embodiment 7 Computer based pedagogy 7 Present state 8 References 9 CHAPTER 3: A RESEARCH OVERV...

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...

Background: One of the ways for effective communication between learners and instructional multimedia content in mobile learning systems is taking advantage of characters or pedagogical agents. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of the levels of realism in mobile-based pedagogical agents on health e-learning. Methods: The s...

Advances in information technologies have resulted in the use of pedagogical agents to facilitate learning. Although several studies have been conducted to examine the effects of pedagogical agents on learning, little is known about gender stereotypes of agents and how those stereotypes influence student learning and attitudes. This study investigates if the pedagogical agent’s gender influence...

This paper introduces the pedagogical agents and describes its characteristics and roles in multimedia modules. It will also include examples of the use of pedagogical agents in previous studies and effective use of pedagogical agents on learning. Next, pedagogical agent variability in terms of physical (ethnicity, gender, image, voice) and internal features (roles, communication and competency...

Ethnicity has been defined primarily by the physical appearance of pedagogical agents. Research has shown that shared ethnicity between the agent and the user reflects in a positive perception of the agent's capabilities and provides motivation for learning tasks for students of color (Baylor, 2005; Nass et al., 2000). However, research has failed to examine what kinds of implementations of ped...

Objectives and Theoretical Framework What are the cognitive consequences of introducing the image of a pedagogical agent in a discovery-based multimedia learning environment? How should pedagogical agents communicate with students to promote constructivist learning? In order to answer these questions, we conducted two sets of studies. First, we varied whether the agent's words were presented as...

Pedagogical agents have made significant strides over the past few years as a new species of learning technologies. This paper is a review on the current state of the art in pedagogical agents, believability and human-likeness, and instructional affordance of the autonomous agents in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. It reviews the challenges that concern pedagogical agents, and proposes research a...

Motivating students is a major issue for current Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Modern theories of motivation (such as the Self Determination Theory) have shown the positive motivational impact of autonomysupport. Following this idea, we have proposed in a previous work an autonomy-supportive motivational design for eLearning systems. Later, the importance to take learner’s culture into account ...

Embodied pedagogical agents – v sually represented, computer generated characters n pedagog cal roles, such as v rtual nstructors, mentors and learn ng compan ons – populate the d g tal soc ety n ncreas ng numbers. They are found n educat onal programmes from preschool to un vers ty, as well as n broader educat onal contexts n the form of med cal counsellors, v rtual health coaches, nformat on ...