How do young children engage with mobile apps? Cognitive,psychomotor, and affective perspective

This paper reports on situations in which children engage with mobile apps to better understand how they learn through such interaction. The following two research questions were postulated to address the research purpose: i) What are the conditions that engage children with mobile apps? ii) How does learning take place during children's engagement with mobile apps? The study was carried out using a qualitative approach by observing young children's interactions when using mobile apps. A total of 18 pre-schoolers aged 4–6 years participated in the study. The observation sessions were video-recorded to unobtrusively observe the participants' interactions with 20 selected mobile apps. The data were analysed using a thematic approach to examining children's emergent behaviours when engaging with mobile apps to identify, generate code, and produce themes. The findings demonstrated three prominent conditions of children's learning engagement: collective sensory skill, emotional expression, and verbal expression. It is evident from the study that learning in this environment takes place through cognitive, psychomotor-based, and affective means. This study provides significant insight on how young children engage with mobile apps to articulate their design implications as well as general guidelines for selecting quality mobile apps to encourage engagement in home, classroom, and library use.     

The effects of augmented virtual science laboratories on middle school students' understanding of gas properties

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) emphasize authentic scientific practices such as developing models and constructing explanations of phenomena. However, research documents how students struggle to explain observable phenomena with molecular-level behaviors with current classroom experiences. For example, physical laboratory experiences in science enable students to interact with observable scientific phenomena, but students often fail to make connections to underlying molecular-level behaviors. Virtual laboratory experiences and computer-based visualizations enable students to interact with unobservable scientific concepts, but students can have difficulties connecting to actual instantiations of the observed phenomenon. This paper investigates how combining physical and virtual experiences into augmented virtual science laboratories can help students build upon intuitive ideas and develop molecular-level explanations of macroscopic phenomena. Specifically, this study uses the Frame, a sensor-augmented virtual lab that uses sensors as physical inputs to control scientific simulations. Eighth-grade students (N = 45) engaged in a Frame lab focused on the properties of gas. Results demonstrate that students using the Frame lab made progress developing molecular-level explanations of gas behavior and refining alternative and partial ideas into normative ideas about gases. This study offers insights for how augmented virtual labs can be designed to enhance science learning and encourage scientific practices as called for in the NGSS.     

Emotional design and positive emotions in multimedia learning: An eyetracking study on the use of anthropomorphisms

The present eyetracking study examined the influence of emotions on learning with multimedia. Based on a 2 × 2 experimental design, participants received experimentally induced emotions (positive vs. neutral) and then learned with a multimedia instructional material, which was varied in its design (with vs. without anthropomorphisms) to induce positive emotions and facilitate learning. Learners who were in a positive emotional state before learning had better learning outcomes in comprehension and transfer tests and showed longer fixation durations on the text information of the learning environment. Although anthropomorphisms in the learning environment did not induce positive emotions, the eyetracking data revealed that learners' attention was captured by this design element. Hence, learners in a positive emotional state who learned with the learning environment that included anthropomorphisms showed the highest learning outcome and longest fixation on the relevant information of the multimedia instruction. Results indicate an attention arousing effect of expressive anthropomorphisms and the relevance of emotional states before learning.     

Multimedia recipe reading: Predicting learning outcomes and diagnosing cooking interest using eye-tracking measures

This study aimed to explore the relationships between students' visual behaviors and learning outcomes, and between visual behaviors and prior cooking interest in multimedia recipe learning. An eye-tracking experiment, including pretest, recall test, and retention test, was conducted with a sample of 29 volunteer hospitality majors in Taiwan. The multimedia recipe included a static page showing the ingredients in a text-and-picture representation and a dynamic page showing the knife skills in a text-and-video representation. Total reading time, total fixation duration, number of fixations and inter-scanning count were used to explore the students' visual attention distributions among the different representation elements and their visual strategies for learning the recipe. The results showed that all students paid more visual attention to the text than to the picture information for the static recipe, and paid more visual attention to the video than to the text on the dynamic page. In addition, the visual attention paid to the text on the dynamic page was negatively correlated with the retention of the episodic knowledge of knife skills. In contrast, the visual attention paid to the text on the static ingredient page was positively correlated with students' prior cooking interest. Finally, the inter-scanning count between text and video on the dynamic page was the best index to negatively predict students' learning retention. Total fixation duration on the text information on the static page was the best index to positively predict students' prior cooking interest. Future studies and applications are discussed.     

The cognitive impact of interactive design features for learning complex materials in medical education

To identify the most effective way for medical students to interact with a browser-based learning module on the symptoms and neurological underpinnings of stroke syndromes, this study manipulated the way in which subjects interacted with a graphical model of the brain and examined the impact of functional changes on learning outcomes. It was hypothesized that behavioral interactions that were behaviorally more engaging and which required deeper consideration of the model would result in heightened cognitive interaction and better learning than those whose manipulation required less deliberate behavioral and cognitive processing. One hundred forty four students were randomly assigned to four conditions whose model controls incorporated features that required different levels of behavioral and cognitive interaction: Movie (low behavioral/low cognitive, n = 40), Slider (high behavioral/low cognitive, n = 36), Click (low behavioral/high cognitive, n = 30), and Drag (high behavioral/high cognitive, n = 38). Analysis of Covariates (ANCOVA) showed that students who received the treatments associated with lower cognitive interactivity (Movie and Slider) performed better on a transfer task than those receiving the module associated with high cognitive interactivity (Click and Drag, partial eta squared = .03). In addition, the students in the high cognitive interactivity conditions spent significantly more time on the stroke locator activity than other conditions (partial eta squared = .36). The results suggest that interaction with controls that were tightly coupled with the model and whose manipulation required deliberate consideration of the model's features may have overtaxed subjects' cognitive resources. Cognitive effort that facilitated manipulation of content, though directed at the model, may have resulted in extraneous cognitive load, impeding subjects in recognizing the deeper, global relationships in the materials. Instructional designers must, therefore, keep in mind that the way in which functional affordances are integrated with the content can shape both behavioral and cognitive processing, and has significant cognitive load implications.     

Effects of type of multimedia strategy on learning of Chinese characters for non-native novices

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of multimedia strategies for instructional techniques and practice on non-native novices' Chinese character learning performance and cognitive load. Two types of multimedia instructional presentations – radical-highlighted and stroke-pronunciation – and two types of practice – visual cue and voice cue – were implemented. Participants were 81 non-native novices randomly assigned to one of the four experimental groups, namely radical-highlighted visual-cue, radical-highlighted voice-cue, stroke-pronunciation visual-cue and stroke-pronunciation voice-cue. An Internet-based e-learning course on the basis of Chinese characters was implemented and delivered as experimental instruction using a Moodle platform. The results show that, for non-native novices, the stroke-pronunciation (SP) strategy of showing strokes with pronunciations is better than the radical-highlighted (RH) strategy, enabling the novices to achieve better performance in identifying Chinese radicals. The significant two-way interactions suggest that (1) the SP presentation should be delivered with the voice-cue (VoC) practice to elicit better performance in writing and in identifying characters and strokes, and (2) the RH presentation should be delivered with visual-cue (ViC) practice to elicit better performance in character writing. Furthermore, participants showed similar levels of perceived cognitive load toward the stroke-based task and the radical-based task. However, when the SP presentation was delivered with the VoC practice, participants revealed lower perceived cognitive load toward the writing task.     

大学历史多媒体教学的现状调查与反思

随着科技的发展,科技元素进入我们的生活中,在为我们提升生活便利的同时,也大大提升了我们的生产生活效率.科学技术应用于教学领域,也是一种十分有力的工具.其中,随着新课改的实施,多媒体教学日渐流行,通过多媒体的平台为学生提供了一个更加广阔的视角,来进一步切身体会知识的魅力.但是,毕竟多媒体技术的应用时间并不长,其中还有很多问题需要我们解决.下面,笔者根据自身教学经验,对大学历史多媒体教学的现状进行分析,并提出相关建议.     

多媒体呼叫中心在IMS移动分组网中的部署研究

提出了一种多媒体呼叫中心在IMS核心网架构下的部署方案，并介绍了各网元的作用，最后给出了呼叫中心注册流程和终端到呼叫中心会话流程。     

分离工程课堂教学中多媒体应用之我见

本文简述了多媒体在本科生课堂教学中的作用及存在的问题,结合分离工程课的特点和本校分离工程教学团队的教学经验,以及笔者在德国高校的教学观摩体会,从板书篇幅设计、课件内容选择、教学节奏控制和屏幕位置设置等方面提出了四点建议。