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Despite the positive potential of the online social networking platforms, the longitudinal studies regarding how children participate in digital storytelling communities is still scant in the literature. This study investigated how 26 elementary students participated in a 2-year digital storytelling community mediated by a social network application. By analyzing the students’ weekly responses, social networks, and their language learning performance, the results suggested that their oral reading proficiency improved along with their participation in the long-term activity. It was also found that the community features impacted the students’ sense of engagement in the activity. The feature of the learning community that allows students to team up with partners to complete a story improved their engagement and motivation. The social network analysis found that multiple literacies including multimedia processing, language, and collaboration were all considered by students as important criteria for the partnership to complete the collaborative digital storytelling work. However, such a prolonged collaborative digital storytelling activity also introduced new challenges for those students demonstrating unfavorable collaboration profiles as they needed to learn how to collaborate in order to team up with others. The implications of the findings for educational practice are discussed.

Help-seeking is an important aspect of self-regulated learning (SRL), but students may have ineffective help-seeking behaviors. For example, some students are unaware of their need to seek help, and some often seek executive help merely to obtain the correct answer. This study proposes a negotiation-based adaptive learning system with a help-seeking negotiation mechanism to form the co-regulation of help-seeking between a student and the system. The system provides external feedback on SRL as scaffolding for help-seeking by prompting students to seek help or even actively offering help when they need it and reminding students not to seek too much help. An experiment was conducted with student participants divided into control and experimental groups. Students in the control group were allowed to seek help at will, whereas the help-seeking of students in the experimental group was regulated by the system. The results indicated that the students in the experimental group had better help-seeking behaviors (a higher ratio of steps solved by themselves and a lower ratio of steps solved with executive help) than the students in the control group.

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is considered as one of the core competencies of the 21st century. Collaborative simulations which allow multiple students to participate in CPS activities in a shared simulation session are now increasingly applied to better facilitate these activities. However, the literature has shown that students' collaboration often does not lead to an effective solution to problems. Guided by the PISA CPS framework, this study thus aimed to analyze students collaboration patterns and problem solving strategies in solving a physics problem, and to identify significant patterns which may lead to a successful or unsuccessful outcome. Multiple data sources including group discussions, problem solving activities in a collaborative simulation, and open-ended questionnaire feedback from 30 high school students were analyzed using the lag sequential analysis technique. It was found that collaborative simulation has the potential to help students situate their discussion in a joint concrete problem space, facilitating their formation of a path to solve the problem. More importantly, the results showed significant differences between the successful and unsuccessful groups in terms of their collaboration patterns and problem solving strategies. A considerable portion of the students could only apply an intuitive trial-and-error strategy, and failed to solve the problem in the end. These students showed an inability to monitor and analyze the problem solving process, and were unable to transform their discussion into an executable plan to solve the problem. Those students who applied analytical reasoning strategies were more likely to achieve a successful problem solving outcome. The implications for educational practice are discussed, and the directions for future studies addressed. This study analyzed collaborative problem solving activities in a collaborative simulation context with LSA techniques.Significant differences in collaboration problem solving patterns were detected between successful and unsuccessful groups.A considerable portion of the students showed an inability to monitor and analyze the problem solving process.These students were unable to transform their discussion into an executable plan to solve the problem.Those students who applied analytical reasoning strategies were more likely to achieve a successful problem solving outcome.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a visualized search system utilizing graphical images to represent the story elements and concepts to help elementary students describe and seek their desired storybooks; and second, to explore the effect of the proposed visualized search system on elementary students’ tactics, success, and motivation for seeking storybooks. Design/methodology/approach A quasi-experimental approach was conducted with a sample of 61 elementary students in this study. The students’ tactics, motivation and the success of their storybook searching were addressed as dependent variables for further comparisons of the visualized searching system and a conventional keyword searching system. Findings The results revealed that the students in the experimental group exhibited more frequent tactics and greater motivation for storybook searching than those in the control group. Further χ2 analysis indicated a significant relationship between the searching interface and the success of the students’ storybook searching. Originality/value This paper proposes a new visual search approach which allows young children to search for storybooks by describing an intended storybook in terms of its characters, objects, or the background colors of the cover page. The findings provide some evidence of the effectiveness of the visualized searching interface in terms of promoting young children’s learning through storybook searching and reading activities.

This paper proposes an approach for developing curriculum-level open student models. This approach entails evaluating student core competencies using the correspondence between courses and core competencies in a competency-based curriculum and students’ taken courses and grades. On the basis of this approach, a curriculum-level, competency-based visualized analytic system, called visualized analytics of core competencies (VACCs), was implemented. Course-competency diagnostic tools, course work performance radar charts, and peer-based ranking tables were developed as part of the VACC analytic system for student reflection and to position their levels of core competencies. These curriculum-level open student models revealed multiple aspects of students’ core competencies by monitoring the quantity and quality of courses taken by students, and evaluating students’ ranks regarding core competencies compared with their classmates and graduates. VACC evaluation was conducted in this paper. The results showed that more than 70% of students reported that VACC helped in reflecting on their core competencies, assisting them in understanding the correspondence between their taken courses and core competencies, and helping them to set goals regarding taking additional courses. In addition, this paper discusses potential analytics and applications of open student models of core competencies.

This study explored the role of visual programming activities in computational thinking. A group of 158 freshmen majoring in information science and communication in Northern Taiwan were engaged in this study. A visual programming platform, computational thinking questionnaire and a programming examination were employed to collect the log data of programming activities, self-responses to computational thinking and the score of programming examination for later analyses. The results reveal that visual programming activities would be critical to the evolution of multiple computational thinking perspectives.

Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive tasks and school learning. Although learning strategies such as selective verbatim note-taking or question-asking may foster intentional recall or resolve comprehension difficulties in paper-based learning practice, improvement in learning may depend on the opportunity and quality of which students apply note-taking, review notes, or enhance comprehension through questioning. This study aims to complement a paper textbook with a mobile phone and to treat the combination as a whole to facilitate verbatim note-taking, resolving comprehension questions, and receiving reading recommendations. The textbook paragraphs were augmented with line numbers to facilitate coordination between the mobile phone and the paper textbook. An eight-week comparative study was conducted to explore the use of two reading vehicles. The results and findings show that using a mobile phone to augment paper-based learning is technically feasible and seems to promote the application of verbatim note-taking and posting comprehension questions for discussion. However, the results of two course tests indicate that consequent learning improvement seemed inconsistent among the students. A six-week case study was also conducted to explore the implications of the augmented support to students' learning practice. The findings show that mobile phones as learning supportive tools to augment paper-based learning could support students' planning and management of learning strategies or activities. The portability of mobile phones and paper textbooks and the ubiquitous connection of paper-based learning with an online learning community may provide the flexibility in planning ahead for suitable learning strategies or activities and may enhance students' assessment for management of students' learning goals.

Since typical introductory programming curricula emphasize the features and syntax of a programming language, rather than the application of programming strategies, most novices are incapable of solving programming problems at the end of curricula. The difference between experts and novices is that experts can develop abstract representation of solutions, called the programming plans, for problems through the experiences obtained from past problems and solutions. The experts then use the programming plans to solve similar program problems. In this study, we develop a system to help students comprehend programming plans by explaining program codes as well as investigate the relationship between goal orientation patterns and self-efficacy.

This paper proposes a visualization tool for supporting representation construction via constraint-based approach. A physics problem can be represented as an operational concept map (OCM) by identifying important concepts and relationships among these concepts from the problem scenario. This form of representation enables the visualization tool to assist a solver to construct a graphical, simulation-enabled concept map regarding a specific physics problem solving. To help solvers construct problem representation and validate its corresponding hypothetical relationships, an OCM integrates the organization function of concept map with hypothesis simulation capability. The application of an OCM is further introduced with a kinematics problem in order to demonstrate the features of hypothesis creations, evaluation, and revision with feedback messages.

In this study, we proposed a new methodology to combine the paper slides, computer screen and a digital pen in order to improve teachers teaching and students learning in the traditional classroom. In students' learning, we design the new course slides which have kept the habit students had a class in the past, and integrate the advantage of real-time online support. In instructors' teaching, instructors can immediately get students' learning status, and change their teaching strategies by recommendations of the system.

This study presented a methodology in which the paper and a mobile phone can complement each other to facilitate ubiquitous learning support. Students, teachers and experts forming a learning community could support with each other as well as exchange their opinions ubiquitously through the links of interactions among paper and mobile phones. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the reading preference as well as effect on learning performance and interviews to explore the interaction among them. Experiment results and interviews showed students preferred reading large text on the paper while browsing recommendation messages or summaries on mobile phones with the help of the paper interface. In addition, these manners of interactions could provide more opportunities for learning support and could have a positive effect on learning performance.

Although quality of display devices is good right now, most textbooks are still printed on papers. At the same time, most learning support and e-learning courseware are built with the assumption that the student only read information displayed on the screen. In this paper, we present an environment that provides learning support via computers, digital devices and network when a student studies a course by reading paper textbooks with a digital pen. The learning support is organized based on the knowledge unit of the location positioning by the digital pen in the textbook. The support includes term explanation, related discussions, underline, and annotation. These studying actions and results on papers will be stored in the computer as well for later use. Initial experiment result on using the system shows that students feel beneficial to their study.