For over a decade, researchers have been investigating the potential of pedagogical agents to promote learning. Most of the research in this area has focused on addressing students' cognitive needs at the expense of affective needs. Intelligent tutoring systems designed following this philosophy have been very effective compared to traditional methods of tutoring (Ritter, Anderson, Koedinger, & Corbett, 2007; VanLehn et al., 2005). However, in recent years, pedagogical agent researchers have begun to appreciate that ignoring student's affective needs can potentially diminish the effect of cognitive tutorial strategies. To address students' affective needs, some pedagogical agent researchers (Lester et al., 1997a; Johnson, Rickel, & Lester, 2000; Moreno, Mayer, Spires, & Lester, 2001) began to exploit Reeves and Nass' (1996) Media Equation, which holds that users respond to interactive media as if they were social actors. Investigations following the Media Equation have tended to focus on the media used to realize the pedagogical agent, e.g., the use of animated talking heads and voices, and the results have been mixed. In my thesis, I focus instead on the manner in which a pedagogical agent communicates with students, i.e., the extent to which it exhibits social intelligence. I propose the hypothesis that pedagogical agents with socially intelligent strategies can affect learning outcomes. I investigated this hypothesis by studying the effect of politeness tactics in two different learning environments, across two different domains: industrial engineering and language learning. Results from these studies support this hypothesis, demonstrating the effect of socially intelligent tactics on learning outcomes. Comparison of results across studies helps to clarify our understanding of the processes whereby tactics employed by pedagogical agents can affect learning outcomes.
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