In this paper, guidelines for designing virtual change agents (VCAs) are proposed to support students' affective and motivational needs in order to promote personalized learning in online remedial mathematics courses. Automated, dynamic, and personalized support is emphasized in the guidelines through maximizing "interactions" between VCAs and…

While the addition of an anthropomorphic interface agent to a learning system generally has little direct impact on learning, it potentially has a huge impact on learner motivation. As such agents become increasingly ubiquitous on the Internet, in virtual worlds, and as interfaces for learning and gaming systems, it is important to design them to…

This study discusses findings that replicate and extend the original work of Burns and Vollmeyer (2002), which showed that performance in problem-solving tasks was more accurate when people were engaged in a non-specific goal than in a specific goal. The main innovation here was to examine the goal specificity effect under both observation-based…

This study attempted to: (1) replicate the density effects found in a previous study; and (2) test the hypothesis that partitioning mediates the effects of high density on children's behavior. Twelve children (5 female, 7 male, ranging in age from 40 to 68 months) were observed under each of four conditions that crossed high and low density with…

This report on the influence of emotional factors on cognitive processes and their importance to the design of man-machine systems intended to function under conditions of threat reviews the literature on stress and human performance, coping strategies, emotion theory, and individual differences in response to stress. A framework for relating…

Discussion of how library buildings communicate affective information and meet users' information needs focuses on a study that investigated locational problems experienced by elementary and high school students in finding books on the shelves. Speed and directness are discussed as measures of success, spatial learning is considered, and…