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This study aims to design an authoring system of robots and IoT-based toys for creating a scenario-based interactive learning environment for young English as a Foreign Language learners. This stud...

The use of technology such as online software has been examined in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing contexts. However, few studies have incorporated context-aware ubiquitous technology i...

The purpose of this study is to review journal papers on educational big data research published from 2010 to 2018. A total of 143 papers were selected. The papers were characterized based on three...

This study conducted a cross-classified multilevel analysis of undergraduate students’ peer-/self-assessment scores in a collaborative learning environment. The analysis intended to investigate group, rater and ratee effects on the peer-/self-assessment scores. The findings showed that group, rater and ratee effects were all statistically significant on peer-/self-assessment scores. The raters’ and ratees’ gender as well as the diversity in group members’ majors influence peer-/self-assessment scores significantly. In addition, there was a statistically significant difference in students’ self and peer ratings. The instructional implications of using cross-classified random effects model to analyze peer-/self-assessment ratings were also discussed in the paper.

As the use of online learning has continued to expand, there has been a growing demand for advanced software or social sites that can enhance learning outcomes in online settings. It is imp...

The ability of automatically modeling learners’ personalities is an important step in building adaptive learning environments. Several studies showed that knowing the personality of each le...

Geometry students have few opportunities to apply geometric concepts and solve geometry problems in authentic contexts. We developed a Ubiquitous Geometry (UG) system to teach geometry to elementary students by using it to measure common objects in authentic contexts. The instant study investigates the effects of UG on student geometry estimation ability, geometry learning achievement, spatial ability, and learning geometric concepts and explores the correlations. Participants were 82 fifth grade students divided into the experiment group (EG), the ruler measurement group (RG), and the control group (CG). The results revealed that the EG students performed significantly better than the others in geometry estimation ability, geometry learning achievement, spatial ability, and understanding geometric concepts. We found that geometry estimation ability is significantly related to spatial ability and geometry learning achievement, which means fostering estimation ability through measuring authentic objects could help students to learn geometry. Finally, students perceived that UG engaged them more in geometry and improved their interest in learning because the activity designs related more to their daily life, thereby enhancing their sense of confidence and satisfaction. Conclusions include that UG effectively enhances student geometry estimation ability, geometry learning achievement, spatial ability, and understanding of geometric concepts.

Collaborative learning has long been proved to be a crucial agent for enhancing students’ social skills, problem-solving abilities and individual learning performance. Understanding how students mo...

Learning Analytics (LA) approaches have proved to be able to enhance learning process and learning performance. However, little is known about applying these approaches for second language acquisition using educational games. Therefore, this study applied LA approaches to design a smart collaborative educational game, to enhance primary school children learning English vocabularies. Specifically, the game provided dashboards to the teachers about their students in a real-time manner. A pilot experiment was conducted in a public primary school where the students’ data from experimental and control groups, namely learning and motivation test scores, interview and observation, were collected and analyzed. The obtained results showed that the experimental group (who used the smart game with LA) had significantly higher motivation and performance for learning English vocabularies than the control group (who used the smart game without LA). The findings of this study can help researchers and practitioners incorporate LA in their educational games to help students enhance language acquisition. © 2021, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja. All rights reserved.

Critical thinking and collaborative learning are both important 21st century skills. Through collaborative learning, students can discuss and work together with peers in reviewing a given scenario critically, reevaluate their initial thoughts and justify their decisions by combining the input from peers. With knowledge of the common difficulties faced in elementary school classrooms when using collaborative learning such as sharing a piece of worksheet, this study utilized the application Explain Everything Collaborate to design a series of critical thinking enhancement exercises that enables students to work simultaneously in real time. By using this application, this study designed a series of critical thinking enhancement exercise using collaborative learning. The study results found that when using the same critical thinking enhancement exercise in an individual learning situation and a collaborative learning situation, students in the collaborative learning groups performed better. Through discussions with peers, students could reexamine their answers through the exposure to different perspectives of the issue provided by their peers. Several observations and findings during the study had provided teachers with promising confidence in implementing collaborative learning in the elementary school classrooms.

This paper reports an analysis of elementary school students’ learning process as they participate in English learning activities using educational robots and IoT-based toys. Grounded on Vygotsky’s notion of zone of proximal development, the analysis is conducted through the lenses of obstacles learners encounter in real learning situations as well as the causes of and the solutions to the encountered obstacles. The techniques of video and qualitative analysis are adopted to conduct this naturalistic inquiry, extracting insight from real-world data for enhancing language learning with emerging technology.

With the rapid growth of mobile technologies, mobile devices have become very popular and have reached a very high spread. Consequently, mobile games have started gaining an increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. This paper investigates the impact of mobile technologies on designing and delivering educational mobile games. In particular, it investigates the evolution of educational games design from being used on computers to being used on mobile devices. To do so, forty studies regarding computer and mobile educational games are reviewed. The obtained results showed that: (1) computer and mobile educational games still share some game design elements. (2) the new embedded mobile devices’ technologies made educational mobile games more immersive and fun. (3) a set of game design recommendations regarding designing mobile educational games which researchers and practitioners can refer to in their context.

Robots can benefit education in many ways, and robotics holds great promise as a learning technology. However, the use of robots in education remains largely unknown to both researchers and educators. Many educators and developers have questions regarding the essential applications for robots used in education. Thus, this study aims to identify the essential applications of educational robots. To gain insight from the perspectives of researchers, experts and educators, we investigate the requirements of educational robots in all levels of education through 3 approaches: systematic literature review, expert interviews and instructor surveys. We review the extant literature that addresses the use of robots in education and adopted data from one of them, and conduct interviews with industry experts, scholars and instructors. We also conduct an online survey that invites instructors from six different levels of education to respond. We find the following to be the top five essential applications for educational robots: language education, robotics education, teaching assistance, social skill development and special education, and guided learning through feedback.

Teacher support for students in ubiquitous learning environments is challenging owing to physical distance and a lack of reliable real-time multimedia-rich communication. This is further complicated because the learning process is dynamic and problems need quick resolution. Given these challenges, this study proposes an architecture for a teacher facilitation support system. The system was implemented in the form of an interactive teacher dashboard. The interface also generates possible solutions to learning challenges while leaving the ultimate decision up to the teacher. The system feasibility was tested by work-through scenarios designed and validated by two experts. The system usability was evaluated using the System Usability Scale by 40 potential users. The findings revealed that the dashboard has good feasibility and usability for providing teachers relevant information about their students’ learning progress in ubiquitous learning environments. It also enabled opportunity for pedagogical in...

With the rapid growth of online education in recent years, Learning Analytics (LA) has gained increasing attention from researchers and educational institutions as an area which can improve the overall effectiveness of learning experiences. However, the lack of guidelines on what should be taken into consideration during application of LA hinders its full adoption. Therefore, this article investigates the issues that should be considered when approaching the design of LA experiences from the data preparation perspective. The obtained results highlight a validated LA framework of twenty-two designing issues that should be considered by various stakeholders in different contexts as well as a set of guidelines which can enhance designing LA experiences.

The increased interaction with multimedia content has been recognized as a significant factor to improve learners’ learning outcomes. As a result, interactive video lectures are increasingly being adopted in digital learning contexts for increasing interactivity. However, conventional video lecture lacks interactive learning activities (ILAs) that are an indispensable component of interactivity. Interactive video lectures can provide learners opportunities to obtain timely constructive support to produce effective learning outcomes because of ILAs. In order to carefully design and create ILAs for effective learning, instructors need to invest substantial efforts for conceiving the content and interactions of ILAs. This study proposed an approach to design the content of ILAs by leveraging collective intelligence (CI) gathered from the discussion forums specifically related to the content of video lectures. When learners exercised ILAs, meaningful interactions by speaking and gesturing worked as learning support to improve comprehension of learning materials. To evaluate the effects of the CI-based ILAs, an experiment was conducted with 90 university students, who were randomly and equally assigned to three different groups (i.e., embodied interactive, non-embodied interactive, and conventional video lectures). The results show that learners who learned with the embodied interactive video lecture performed better in comprehension and retention of learning contents than the other two counter groups. The findings also revealed that this approach does not impose any additional cognitive load on learners. The design guidelines derived in this study can serve as reference for instructors to create interactive video lectures with CI-based ILAs in digital learning contexts.

Background: This study presents an intelligent table tennis e-training system based on a neural network (NN) model that recognizes data from sensors built into an armband device, with the component values (performances scores) estimated through principal component analysis (PCA). Methods: Six expert male table tennis players on the National Youth Team (mean age 17.8 ± 1.2 years) and seven novice male players (mean age 20.5 ± 1.5 years) with less than 1 year of experience were recruited into the study. Three-axis peak forearm angular velocity, acceleration, and eight-channel integrated electromyographic data were used to classify both player level and stroke phase. Data were preprocessed through PCA extraction from forehand loop signals. The model was trained using 160 datasets from five experts and five novices and validated using 48 new datasets from one expert and two novices. Results: The overall model’s recognition accuracy was 89.84%, and its prediction accuracies for testing and new data were 93.75% and 85.42%, respectively. Principal components corresponding to the skills “explosive force of the forearm” and “wrist muscle control” were extracted, and their factor scores were standardized (0–100) to score the skills of the players. Assessment results indicated that expert scores generally fell between 60 and 100, whereas novice scores were less than 70. Conclusion: The developed system can provide useful information to quantify expert-novice differences in fore-hand loop skills.

Today people learn in many diverse locations and contexts, beyond the confines of classical brick and mortar classrooms. This trend is ever increasing, progressing hand-in-hand with the progress of technology. Context-aware learning systems are systems which adapt to the learner's context, providing tailored learning for a particular learning environment. Existing context-aware learning systems often utilize sui generis systems, which require extensive work to develop and implement, can be difficult to re-use, and do not necessarily facilitate collaboration. In an effort to alleviate problems found in existing context-aware learning systems, this paper proposes a framework, and subsequent evaluation, for the development of context-aware learning systems. The proposed framework allows for the design and develop learning systems for different types of learning scenarios, with the ability to adapt to the context in which the learner is situated.

Training efficiency is important for functional fitness training because it assures the trainees receive appropriate training to meet their needs of skill formation. With the support of technologies, the functional fitness training process can be adapted to suit each elder’s physical conditions. This study proposes a dual adaptive strategy for adjusting exercise intensity levels based on the objective assessments and subjective feedback to balance body and mind conditions. An adaptive exercising system was also developed by using gesture recognition and perceived exertion to adjust exercise intensity levels and help the elders receive more appropriate training. The results show that the dual adaptive strategy proven to be able to provide better balance (body and mind) and improve training efficiency for elders’ functional fitness training at their own paces while gaining a satisfied training experience.

Critical thinking is one of the core 21st century skills, and it is vital for individuals to start mastering this skill from a young age. Socratic questioning is a systematic and disciplined string of questioning that is used to support the enhancement of critical thinking skill through the exploration of complex ideas, understanding the facts, identifying issues, examine assumptions and more. This study proposed to design critical thinking enhancement exercises for elementary school students using Socratic questioning strategy. Throughout the enhancement exercise, the study introduced Socratic questioning strategy was designed as hints to support students in completing the exercise and have deeper thoughts prior to sharing their thoughts regarding a given issue or problem. The results of the study indicated that the designed critical thinking learning sessions were effective in enhancing students' critical thinking skill. More importantly, the results also indicated that Socratic questioning strategy had provided students with a positive and significant support in the enhancement of their critical thinking skill.

The application of augmented reality in the field of education is increasing in popularity due to its unique characteristic of embedding digital information into the real-life environment. With better simulation and presentation, this had improved students’ engagement in the learning process, resulting in a better learning experience and learning performance for students. In this chapter, two research involved in applying and designing different augmented reality applications in different learning subjects for elementary school students are presented (i.e., science and cultural study). These two research utilized different approaches in terms of pedagogy and augmented reality application design to fulfil the requirement for different learning subjects. A discussion on the benefits of each augmented reality application designed for each learning subject is shared, along with the shortcomings and improvements that could be done to further improve each application’s design. With the collaboration with elementary schoolteachers throughout these two research, a discussion on key items in the process of selecting the usage of different augmented reality applications in designing learning activities for different learning subjects is also discussed in the chapter.

In view of the benefits of and success in acquiring multiple languages in an immersive learning environment while young, this research aims to create an immersive language learning environment for young children to acquire multiple languages utilizing robots and IoT (Internet of Things) -based toys. This paper presents the results from the first two stages of this project aiming to develop a design framework to guide the development of such an immersive environment. Our extensive review of the relevant literature indicates that the framework should, at least, consist of five main pedagogical considerations: language input, activity design, interaction design, toy design and robot design. In each of the five dimensions, a number of key factors should also be addressed in creating an effective learning environment. The development of the design framework is to serve as a road map providing design principles and guidelines for educators and researcher to create an immersive learning environment.

This study aims to develop an application of smart watches for information gap activity in English communication. This study investigates the effects of using the smart watch guiding application in an information gap activity on the willingness to communicate (WTC) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) within a real-world situated condition in The British Consulate at Takow, Taiwan. According to learner's knowledge space this application provides hints and guiding to the learner for information exchanges during the information gap activity. This study shows the benefits of using the smart watch guiding application for information gap activity in a real-world situation. Participants were thirty-two EFL (English as a Foreign Language) university students. The results showed that the smart watch guiding application affected the willingness to communicate positively and facilitated the information gap activity.

Learning analytics (LA) in educational games is considered an emerging practice due to its potential of enhancing the learning process. Growing research on formative assessment has shed light on the ways in which students' meaningful and in-situ learning experiences can be supported through educational games. To understand learners' playful experiences during gameplay, researchers have applied LA, which focuses on understanding students' in-game behaviour trajectories and personal learning needs during play. However, there is a lack of studies exploring how further research on LA in educational games can be conducted. Only a few analyses have discussed how LA has been designed, integrated, and implemented in educational games. Accordingly, this systematic literature review examined how LA in educational games has evolved. The study findings suggest that: (1) there is an increasing need to consider factors such as student modelling, iterative game design and personalisation when designing and implementing LA through educational games; and (2) the use of LA creates several challenges from technical, data management and ethical perspectives. In addition to outlining these findings, this article offers important notes for practitioners, and discusses the implications of the study’s results.

Working memory capacity (WMC) plays an important role in the learning process, because learners need to hold and process some information in the short-term memory while they are engaged in learning activities. Measuring learners' WMC can be helpful to support and enhance their learning. For example, teachers can use this information to adapt their teaching strategies according to learners' level of WMC. In addition, information about learner's WMC can be exploited by adaptive e-learning systems for providing recommendations to support learners with low and high WMC. Furthermore, early detection of the level of individual learner's WMC is a very important step to be able to provide appropriate intervention for the learners. In this context, a number of tools are available in the literature to explicitly measure learner's WMC. However, most of them require considerable experience in the administration and interpretation of results. This study proposes an approach based on fuzzy logic for measuring learner's WMC in an unobtrusive manner, from learner's interactions with an educational game. Results of experiments proved the effectiveness of this method in measuring WMC. The educational game, used in this work, could help parents and teachers to know the WMC of their kids and learners. In addition, the proposed approach could be adapted by researchers working in this field to measure learners' WMC using other educational games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in technology in recent years have changed the learning behaviors of learners and reshaped teaching methods. This had resulted in several challenges faced by current educational systems, such as an increased focus on informal learning, a growing gap of prior knowledge among students in classrooms and a mismatch between individual career choices and the development of the work force. This paper looks at these challenges with a view towards revolutionizing current learning environments to smart learning environments and provides new suggestions for technological solutions. Furthermore, this paper argues for a transformation from the current learning environments to smart learning environments. This is to be achieved by reengineering the fundamental structure and operations of current educational systems to better integrate these new technologies with the required pedagogical shift. The future perspectives of smart learning environments are reviewed and shared, through examples of emerging innovations such as the flipped classroom, game based learning, gesture based learning, along with pedagogical shifts, such as life-long learning portfolio maintenance, team teaching, and separation of learning and competency assessment.

Mastering English as a second language had been challenging for Taiwanese students, to top it up with understanding English idioms just adds fuel to the fire. Without the awareness and knowledge about idioms, students would be prone to take the idioms as its literal meaning, which most often would not be accurate. This would lead to students misunderstanding the true meaning of the context. Past research had shown that situated learning could ease the learning process for students and form beneficial knowledge. Augmented reality (AR) is useful in facilitating situated learning, not only it engages students in the learning context, but it was also proven to be effective in improving students' performance. Furthermore, scaffolding strategy, a specific type of mediational tool used for learning, had been proven to effectively assist students in overcome challenges during the learning process. Therefore, this research designed a learning application to improve learners' learning performance in learning English idioms, using the assistance of scaffolding strategy in a situated learning settings which is supported by AR. The research results had shown that the learning application is effective in assisting university students in learning about English idioms.

Blockchain is the core technology used to create the cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin. As part of the fourth industrial revolution since the invention of steam engine, electricity, and information technology, blockchain technology has been applied in many areas such as finance, judiciary, and commerce. The current paper focused on its potential educational applications and explored how blockchain technology can be used to solve some education problems. This article first introduced the features and advantages of blockchain technology following by exploring some of the current blockchain applications for education. Some innovative applications of using blockchain technology were proposed, and the benefits and challenges of using blockchain technology for education were also discussed.

Not all that glitters is gold, not all who wander are lost, and equally as true, cloud computing is not the ultimate solution to educational computing problems. Although the possibility of utilizing cloud computing can appear to be a heaven-sent solution for educational applications, a more down to earth review of the possible drawbacks and limitations needs to be conducted.

Many Indigenous learners worldwide find the learning materials presented in current educational settings culturally irrelevant. A lack of relevant learning materials within formal education settings subscribing to Western Euro-centric curriculum standards is a key factor. Learning materials provided through modelling, practice, and apprenticeship, are desired. With the literature identifying the lack of a formal curriculum design process, a framework is presented for standardized creation of learning objects for Indigenous learners. To determine the efficacy of the framework, two case study examples and prototype tools were presented to Indigenous knowledge expert interviewees to identify strengths, weaknesses and additional benefits to the proposed framework. Incorporating learners in the design process from the beginning was highlighted as being a very positive approach. The benefits of this research include that it provides an interface, in the form of a prototype, to allow educators to create relevant and authentic learning for Indigenous learners. Additional work is needed on simplifying the process of knowledge creation for educators and on ensuring that any knowledge used maintains cultural and contextual meaning to the communities in which it was generated., published version, peerReviewed

A novel contextual topic model is proposed for multi-document summarization.The main idea is to leverage hierarchical topics and their correlations with respect to the lexical co-occurrences of words.The proposed contextual topic model can effectively determine the relevance of sentences. Information overload becomes a serious problem in the digital age. It negatively impacts understanding of useful information. How to alleviate this problem is the main concern of research on natural language processing, especially multi-document summarization. With the aim of seeking a new method to help justify the importance of similar sentences in multi-document summarizations, this study proposes a novel approach based on recent hierarchical Bayesian topic models. The proposed model incorporates the concepts of n-grams into hierarchically latent topics to capture the word dependencies that appear in the local context of a word. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation results show that this model has outperformed both hLDA and LDA in document modeling. In addition, the experimental results in practice demonstrate that our summarization system implementing this model can significantly improve the performance and make it comparable to the state-of-the-art summarization systems.

This chapter aims to contribute the concept, design, and implementation of the flipped classroom for pre-service and in-service teachers to run a flipped classroom. Two essential components, pre-recorded interactive video lectures and incorporating highly interactive learning activities, of flipped classroom are first identified. Then, the six types of classrooms are proposed including physical classroom, asynchronous cyber classroom, synchronous cyber classroom, mobile classroom, social classroom, and ubiquitous classroom. Each classroom can be interwoven with the two essential components in order to provide six different venues for students to learn a unit/lesson. In other words, the six types of classrooms are implemented to conduct/support versatile learning activities so as to maximize the flexibility of flipped classrooms. Except for physical classroom, the benefits of using other types of classrooms are cyber face to face, equal distance among all participants. The purpose of the two essential components and the six different types of classrooms is to provide more opportunities for student to learn a topic in depth in the flipped classroom. Additionally, a methodology containing four implementation stages is elaborated in this chapter to help teachers to conduct flipped classrooms. These four-stage methods are designing learning content, leading learning activity, guiding students with specific learning difficulties, and managing good learning atmosphere across multiple learning spaces. Each stage fully utilized the aforementioned two essential components and six types of classrooms. Feasible solutions addressing potential issues and challenges are also proposed in this chapter.

Critical thinking is among the few important skills in the 21st century, hence it is crucial that the skill is cultivated in students. Before cultivating the skill, one needs to be able to measure the level of student's critical thinking skills. Existing critical thinking skill assessments do not cater for elementary school students and are usually close-ended questions. The research's objective was to design a computer application to assess students' level of critical thinking skill by using a storytelling approach with two folk stories, with questions inserted in between to measure students' critical thinking skills. Students were required to answer these questions through voice recordings instead of writing their answers on paper. The assessment mostly consisted of open-ended questions, requiring students to share their thoughts and provide reasoning for their answers. The research also identified schools' environmental factors and students' background that affect their critical thinking skills. The results showed that schools with a different focus, students' preference in reading books and comic books, and time spent on reading comic books could affect the students' level of critical thinking.

Robot has been receiving increasing attention and robot in education is considered a promising aid for teaching and learning in many ways. This study attempts to investigate the need of the educational robot among six different user groups (pre-school user, primary school user, high school user, college user, adult user and elderly user). A triangulation technique was applied for cross validation, including systematic literature review, experts' interview and instructors' survey. It is expected that through this research the need of educational robot for six user groups can be clearly identified and to propose future directions for the development of educational robots.

The flipped learning model, which "flips" traditional in-class lectures with collaborative activities, has gained many followers and converts in K-12 education. However, a review of previous studies shows that the flipped model is still underutilized and underexplored in the higher education context. Research and design models for flipped learning in higher education are also insufficient. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing a model that can provide a foundation for further research and practice for flipped learning in higher education. Building from the four pillars of F-L-I-P? (Flexible Environments, Learning Culture, Intentional Content, and Professional Educators), the proposed research and design model named "FLIPPED" adds three extra letters-P-E-D (Progressive Activities, Engaging Experiences, and Diversified Platforms)-to the F-L-I-P? acronym. This model was implemented in a "Holistic Flipped Classroom" environment and evaluated based on a student survey, interviews, and an analysis of computer system logs. Findings demonstrated that the proposed model was effective; students reported that they were satisfied with the course, their attendance improved, and their study efforts increased. Results also suggested that the transactional distance changed during the learning process: highly motivated students performed much better than less motivated students. However, some students retained their former passive learning habits, and this resulted in an obstruction to full adoption. Reflections on the achievements and challenges of the "FLIPPED" model have culminated in various examples, guidelines, and suggestions for practitioners as they consider their own design, implementation, and adoption.1 Develops the FLIPPED research & design model for higher education.Uses the Holistic Flipped Classroom approach to implement the model.Research was conducted using a survey, interviews, and system log analysis.Identifies challenges and problems during the implementation.Provides strategies, examples, and guidelines for future practitioners.

This study used content analysis of journal articles from 2001 to 2013 to explore the characteristics and trends of empirical research on gesture-based computing in education. Among the 3018 articles retrieved from 5 academic databases by a comprehensive search, 59 articles were identified manually and then analyzed. The distribution and trends analyzed were research methods, study disciplines, learning content, technology used, and intended settings of the gesture-based learning systems. Furthermore, instructional interventions were also analyzed based on the learning context or the sub-education domain to which they belonged to ascertain if any instructional intervention was applied in these systems. It was found that experimental design research is the most commonly used method (72.9%) followed by design-based research (20.3%). The findings indicate that Nintendo Wii is the gesture-based device that is the most often used (40%), while the domain in which the technology is most frequently used is special education (42.4%). The same trend was also found in a further analysis which identified that the domain which uses Wii the most is special education (70%). Among all the identified learning topics, motor skills learning has the highest percentage (44%). When grouping these topics into three domains of knowledge (procedural, conceptual, and both), the result demonstrates that both procedural and conceptual type of knowledge are equally distributed in the gesture-based learning studies. Finally, a comparison of instructional intervention of gesture-based learning systems in different sub-education domains is reported.

The challenge of assessment in collaborative learning is well known. The major issue is whether the assessment should focus on the individual level or the group level. Traditional assessment approaches only concern about individualized assessment, examination, or coding individual transcripts into speech acts. How to support teachers to monitor and assess collaborative learning processes at the group level has not been systematically addressed. This paper aims to design a new approach for assessing collaborative learning processes and group performance through the lens of knowledge convergence. We use the innovative knowledge map approach to analyze the degree of process and outcome convergence so as to provide insight into the qualities of collaborative learning processes. A total of 94 undergraduate students participated in this study. The empirical results indicate that the qualities of process can be quantified by the number of activated common knowledge and the degree of process convergence. The degree of outcome convergence can be used as an effective indicator for assessing group performance. Implications for instructors to facilitate knowledge convergence in collaborative learning are also discussed. The major contribution of this study is the design of a novel approach to assess a collaborative learning process and outcome by analyzing the degree of knowledge convergence.

Along with the advancement of information and communication technology, researchers have pointed out the necessity and challenges of developing effective instructional strategies to enhance students' web-based problem-solving performance, which refers to the ability of investigating a series of related problems via searching for, abstracting and summarizing information on the web. In this study, a creative thinking strategy is proposed to cope with this problem. Moreover, an experiment was conducted on 80 freshmen from two classes of a university to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improved the students' web-based problem solving performance in comparison with the conventional approach in terms of ''problem finding'' and ''idea finding.'' Moreover, it was found that the proposed approach could improve the ''fact finding'' performance of the students with intuitive-type cognitive style. Accordingly, some implications and suggestions are given for educators who attempt to conduct web-based problem-solving activity.

A student’s learning style is the approach for learning that best allows the student to gather and to understand knowledge in a specific manner. Providing students with learning materials and activities that fit to their learning styles seems to have high potential to make learning easier for them. This research aims at providing teachers with recommendations on how to best extend their existing e-courses in learning management systems to accommodate more students with different learning styles. A smart e-course recommender tool has been developed for this purpose, which analyzes the e-courses with respect to their support levels for different students’ learning styles, recommends learning objects to be added to the courses, and visualizes the recommendations and the improvement in the course support level for students’ with different learning styles. The experimental results indicate that the tool has the ability to recommend suitable learning objects that, once being added, significantly improve the course support level for accommodating more students with different learning styles.

Although students could effectively search for web data with proper keywords and select web pages related to the studied core issue, however summarizing or organizing the retrieved information remains a difficult task for them. Concept mapping is known to be an effective knowledge construction tool for helping learners organize important concepts related to a core issue. To address the problem, an integrated concept mapping and web-based problem-solving environment, CM-Quest, has been developed; moreover, an experiment has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach on students' learning performance, learning satisfaction and cognitive load in an elementary school social studies course. The results show that the concept map-integrated approach can significantly enhance the students' web-based problem-solving performance, although the students showed lower degrees of technology acceptance and learning satisfaction in comparison with the conventional web-based problem-solving approach. Moreover, it is found that the students in the concept mapping group revealed higher cognitive loads than those in the control group, which could be the factor contributing to the lower technology acceptance degree and learning satisfaction. As a consequence, it is concluded that the integrated concept mapping and web-based problem-solving approach is helpful to students in guiding them to learn in a more effective way. On the other hand, it remains an open issue to find a suitable way of integrating concept maps into the learning process without introducing too much extra cognitive load so as to promote students' acceptance degree of using technology for better learning.

Engaging students in reflection during real-world observation and inquiry activities has been recognized as an important issue for improving students' learning achievement and motivation. Many studies in the literature have adopted text-based reflection prompts as an important strategy to promote learning performance, this study argues that using videos as a reflection prompt would be more effective for improving learners' ubiquitous learning experiences and can provide a more sensible scenario that is better fitting the real-world contexts than the text-based prompts. In this study, a context-aware video-based prompt approach is proposed for improving students' reflection levels and satisfaction by providing timely and personalized guidance using mobile, wireless communication and sensing technologies. An experiment was conducted for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed video-based prompt strategy with 70 participants in two groups. The results show that learners' reflection levels were significantly improved with the use of the proposed approach and that positive attitudes were observed toward the use of video-based prompts in the context-aware ubiquitous learning environment.

Research has shown that language learning with the form of human body could promote learner performance on the basis of theory of embodied cognition. Total physical response (TPR) has long been used to enhance vocabulary learning. However, TPR has its limitation that teachers are unable to attend to all individual students when the class size is beyond manageable. Thus, to enhance English vocabulary learning, this study proposes an integration of motion-sensing technology and theory of embodied cognition into the total physical response (TPR) approach, called Embodiment-based TPR approach. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a total of 50 fifth-grade elementary students participated in this study. Experimental group adopted Embodiment-based TRP learning approach, while control group took conventional TPR learning approach. Cognitive performance and acceptance feedback for the proposed approach were collected in the experiment. Results showed that both the post-test and the delay test concerning English vocabulary learning performance between the two groups had no significant difference. However, the result of learning retention showed a significant regression for the control group while the experimental group’s learning retention retained, which implies the Embodiment-based TPR approach could bring better learning retention than the conventional TPR approach. In addition, experimental group showed a highly positive level of acceptance toward the proposed learning approach.

The advancement of the Internet technology has changed the way how different types of classrooms can be created including the blending of multiple physical classrooms, synchronous cyber classrooms and asynchronous cyber classrooms. Classes in rural and urban schools could be fully integrated together by using various synchronous tools such as video conferencing systems, electronic whiteboards, interactive response systems, etc. The way of fully integrating two or more physical classrooms together to support online real-time interaction among teachers and students in different locations is called Blended Synchronous Classroom (BSC) in this study. Rural schools cannot attract enough number of good teachers which creates a serious problem of education inequality. A promising solution to this problem is to bring good teachers from urban schools to rural schools by using BSC approach. In this study, a two-year long project of applying BSC approach in two primary schools in Ningbo China is reported, and the effectiveness of BSC is explored through comparative analysis, questionnaire survey and classroom video analysis. The results of this study include: (1) students' learning performance in rural school was improved significantly after the two-year practice of BSC; (2) there are no significant differences in the perceptions of the efficiency of BSC between students in local class and remote class; (3) teachers pay equal attention to students in both local and remote classrooms is the key factor to the success of BSC implementation. The large-scale application of BSC to deal with urban-rural divide is discussed based on the results.

Mobile learning benefits from the unique merits of mobile devices and mobile technology to give learners capability to access information anywhere and anytime. However, mobile learning also has many challenges, especially in the processing and delivery of learning content. With the aim of making the learning content suitable for the mobile environment, this study investigates automatic text summarization to provide a tool set that reduces the quantity of textual content for mobile learning support. Text summarization is used to condense texts into the most important ideas. However, reducing the amount of content transmitted may negatively impact the meaning conveyed within. Although many solutions of text summarization have been applied by intelligent tutoring systems for learning support, few of them have been quantitatively investigated for learning achievements of learners, especially in mobile learning context. This study focuses on a methodology for investigating the effectiveness of automatic text summarization used in mobile learning context. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed summarization approach is able to generate summaries effectively, and those generated summaries are perceived as helpful to support mobile learning. The findings of this work indicate that properly summarized learning content is not only able to satisfy learning achievements, but also able to align content size with the unique characteristics and affordances of mobile devices.

Learning through problem solving has been widely adopted as an effective learning paradigm in challenging domains such as medical education. For effective learning through practical experience, problem solving and knowledge construction should be highly integrated and reciprocally reinforcing. However, both knowledge construction and problem solving are complex cognitive processes, which cannot be easily captured and mastered. Temporal problem-solving experience can be forgotten, and knowledge embedded in problem-solving experience may not be transferable to new problems. This study aimed to address the challenge via proposing a computer-based learning environment, where a visualization-based cognitive tool was designed to make thinking and learning in a problem context visible and to connect problem-solving and knowledge-construction activities throughout the learning process. An online learning program using the proposed learning environment was delivered to thirty-five students from two medical schools. The design of the proposed learning environment and its effects on problem-based learning are examined with implications for further studies.

This paper presents a design for a cutting-edge English program in which elementary school learners of English as a foreign language in Taiwan had lively interactions with a teaching assistant robot. Three dimensions involved in the design included (1) a pleasant and interactive classroom environment as the learning context, (2) a teaching assistant robot designed and built by the researchers as instructional technology (instructional tool/medium), and (3) the need for improved motivation and learning outcomes and positive learning experiences of the students as the core research problem. This Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) led to better pedagogical effects on learning and teaching by (1) employing a vivid, enjoyable teaching approach; (2) adopting practical, interesting learning materials; and (3) creating a natural, enjoyable learning context. Both quantitative and qualitative findings of this study indicate that the students' English learning experiences were enhanced, as were their motivation and learn...