for the vast majority of the iranian m.a. students of tefl, thesis writing is the first individual engagement with research. despite having some pedagogical merits, such an academic activity generally poses some intellectual and affective challenges to such students. during thesis completion, if students are not effectively scaffolded by supervisors and not supported by universities, they are l...

This paper describes a challenging plan recognition problem that arises in environments in which agents engage widely in exploratory behavior, and presents new algorithms for effective plan recognition in such settings. In exploratory domains, agents’ actions map onto logs of behavior that include switching between activities, extraneous actions, and mistakes. Flexible pedagogical software, suc...

Interactive Pedagogical Dramas (IPD) are compelling interactive stories that have didactic purpose. Autonomous agents realize the characters in these dramas. Their roles may be to portray humans facing overwhelming, emotionally-charged difficulties. This challenges the agents to interact with a depth and subtlety that is consistent with human behavior in difficult, stressful situations. To addr...

Interactions between learners and pedagogical agents may take on a more or less social tone, dependent on many possible factors. We investigate the effects of manipulating agent dialog on learner-agent interpersonal relations, which is hypothesized to promote learning. We have implemented our model of social instructional dialog (SID) in an agent in a virtual learning environment for instructin...

We illustrate a pedagogical metadata model (IMATI-ITD pedagogical metadata model) that captures didactic features of LOs according to the view of the education world. This model allows to describe a variety of contexts and can be effectively instantiated in many specific educational situations, thus combining generality with flexibility features.

We present a study that addressed if providing students with scaffolding about how to “integrate” science text and animations impacts content learning. Scaffolding was delivered by a pedagogical agent and driven by student’s eye gaze movements (compared to controls). We hypothesized that students in the pedagogical agent condition would engage in richer learning as evidence by a more “integrate...