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A pedagogical agent is a concept borrowed from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and applied to education, usually as part of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). It is a simulated human-like interface between the learner and the content, in an educational environment. A pedagogical agent is designed to model the type of interactions between a student and another person. Mabanza and de Wet define it as “as a character enacted by a computer that interacts with the user in a socially engaging manner”. A pedagogical agent can be assigned different roles in the learning environment, such as tutor or co-learner, depending on the desired purpose of the agent. “A tutor agent plays the role of a teacher, while a co-learner agent plays the role of a learning companion".

History
The history of Pedagogical Agents is closely aligned with the history of computer animation. As computer animation became available, it was adopted by educators to enhance computerized learning by including a lifelike interface between the program and the learner. The first versions of a pedagogical agent were more cartoon than person, like Microsoft's Clippy which helped user's of Microsoft Office load and use the program's features in 1997. By 2006 there was a call to develop modular, reusable agents to decrease the time and expertise required to create a pedagogical agent. There was also a call in 2009 to inact agent standards. the standardization and re-usability of pedagogical agents is less of an issue since the decrease in cost and widespread availability of animation tools. Individualized pedagogical agents can be found across disciplines including medicine, math, law, language learning, automotive, and armed forces. They are used in applications directed to every age, from preschool to adult.

Effectiveness
It has been suggested by researchers that pedagogical agents may take on different roles in the learning environment. Examples of these roles are: supplanting, scaffolding, coaching, testing, or demonstrating or modelling a procedure. A pedagogical agent as a tutor has not been demonstrated to add any benefit to an educational strategy in equivalent lessons with and without a pedagogical agent. According to Richard Mayer, there is some support in research for pedagogical agent increasing learning, but only as a presenter of social cues. A co-learner pedagogical agent is believed to increase the student's self-efficacy. A pedagogical agent fulfills many multimedia learning principles such as signaling and dual coding. Research has shown that human-human interaction may not be completely replaced by pedagogical agents, but learners may prefer the agents to non-agent multimedia systems. This finding is supported by social agency theory.

Examples of Pedagogical Agents
There are many examples of pedagogical agents. As interactive learning objects become more prevalent, so do pedagogical agents.
 * AI: Artificial Intelligence Research at USC Information Science Institute
 * http://ldt.stanford.edu/~slater/pages/agents/main.htm

Articles and Websites
http://schroedertechwarehouse.weebly.com/publications.html