  A Persuasive Teachable Agent (PTA) is a special type of Teachable Agent which
incorporates a persuasion theory in order to provide persuasive and more
personalized feedback to the student. By employing the persuasion techniques,
the PTA seeks to maintain the student in a high motivation and high ability
state in which he or she has higher cognitive ability and his or her changes in
attitudes are more persistent. However, the existing model of the PTA still has
a few limitations. Firstly, the existing PTA model focuses on modelling the
PTA's ability to persuade, while does not model its ability to be taught by the
student and to practice the knowledge it has learnt. Secondly, the quantitative
model for computational processes in the PTA has low reusability. Thirdly,
there is still a gap between theoretical models and practical implementation of
the PTA.
  To address these three limitations, this book proposes an improved agent
model which follows a goal-oriented approach and models the PTA in its totality
by integrating the Persuasion Reasoning of the PTA with the Teachability
Reasoning and the Practicability Reasoning. The project also proposes a more
abstract and generalized quantitative model for the computations in the PTA.
With higher level of abstraction, the reusability of the quantitative model is
also improved. New system architecture is introduced to bridge the gap between
theoretical models and implementation of the PTA.
