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Towards evaluating human-instructable software agents

The Bootstrapped Learning (BL) project is an attempt to create software agents (e-students) that are instructable by human teachers through natural instruction methods [Oblinger, 2006]. In this paper, we present an introduction to BL and three years of case studies investigating the use of human subjects in evaluating e-students. In our studies we investigate human teachers’ expectations of e-students and important differences between human and software learners, including the greater semantic understanding of humans, the eidetic memory of e-students, and the importance of various study parameters including timing issues and lesson complexity to human performance.