Usability,expectation, confirmation,and continuance intentions to use electronic textbooks

A trend in education is the use of electronic textbooks (e-textbook, [Stone, R. W., and L. Baker-Eveleth. 2013. “Students’ Expectation, Confirmation, and Continuance Intention to Use Electronic Textbooks.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (3): 984–990.]). A variety of research has examined the motivations for e-textbook adoption as well as continuance intentions of e-textbooks after an initial adoption. This research extends the continuance intentions literature using the expectation–confirmation model ([Bhattacherjee, A. 2001. “Understanding Information Systems Continuance: An Expectation–Confirmation Model.” MIS Quarterly 25 (3): 351–370.]) and including the constructs of e-textbook usability and its dimensions. The data were responses to an online questionnaire by students at a medium-sized (USA) university. A total of 1434 responses were received for a 12.52% response rate. These responses were partitioned to include only complete responses from students who had previously used an e-textbook. This produced a sample of 639 questionnaire responses for empirical analysis. The analysis was performed using structural equation modelling (i.e. Procedure Calis in PC SAS version 9.2). The results showed that students' continuance intentions of e-textbooks are driven by students' satisfaction with e-textbooks and perceived usefulness. Additionally, students' expectation–confirmation and e-textbook usability positively influence both students' satisfaction and perceived usefulness and hence the intentions for continued e-textbook adoptions. Finally, the usability dimensions of efficiency and effectiveness significantly influence e-textbook usability.     

Students’ expectation,confirmation, and continuance intention to use electronic textbooks

Technology applied to education has produced numerous changes. One of these changes is the availability of electronic textbooks. However, the adoption of electronic textbooks has been slower than anticipated. This research examines adoption of electronic textbooks through studying electronic textbook users’ continuance intentions. Data for the model were collected using a survey of university students. The questionnaire was web-based and distributed using a student listserv. The sample consisted of 469 usable responses received from students who had previously used an electronic textbook. The theoretical model was analyzed using structural equations modeling and maximum likelihood estimation applied to the sample. A confirmatory factor analysis was also performed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the measures for the constructs in the theoretical model. The psychometric properties of the measures were good. The fit of the measured theoretical model to the data was also good and all the paths in the measurement and structural models were statistically significant. The structural model shows that confirmation influences perceived usefulness of electronic textbooks and satisfaction with electronic textbooks. Satisfaction and perceived usefulness of electronic textbooks influence electronic textbook continuance intention. Implications and conclusions based on these findings were also provided.     

The impact of learner attributes and learner choice in an agent-based environment

This study examined the impact of learners’ attributes (gender and ethnicity) on their choice of a pedagogical agent and the impact of the attributes and choice on their perceptions of agent affability, task-specific attitudes, task-specific self-efficacy, and learning gains. Participants were 210 high-school male and female, Caucasian and Hispanic students who worked at computer-based algebra integrated with pedagogical agents. The results indicated, first, that students preferentially chose a same-gender agent and a same-ethnicity agent. Second, males who chose an agent showed more positive attitudes toward working at the learning environment than did males who were assigned to an agent whereas females who were assigned to an agent showed more positive attitudes than did females who chose an agent. Third, Hispanic students showed more positive attitudes toward working at the learning environment than Caucasians. Fourth, females perceived the agent as significantly more affable than did males; Hispanics perceived the agent as significantly more affable than did Caucasians. Last, learner attributes and choice did not affect learning gains in the agent-based environment; rather, the participants overall significantly increased their performances after the intervention.     

Augmenting paper-based learning with mobile phones

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.     

Retracted: Examining students' learning,perceived learning and motivation in social annotation-based translation activities

This study was conducted to examine how a collaborative social annotation tool can be used to support collaborative learning in translation instruction for EFL students. Participants were 100 undergraduate students who were English majors in a southeast university in China. An experiment with crossover design was carried out to examine the participants' learning and motivation in the social annotation-supported condition and the traditional instruction condition. The results showed that students received higher scores on their translation work and rated their perceived learning higher when they completed the translation assignments in the social annotation-support condition than in the traditional instruction condition. In addition, participants reported that they were more motivated when they completed the translation assignments in the social annotation-supported condition, though participants with different levels of language proficiency might be motivated by different reasons.     

A study on learning effect among different learning styles in a Web-based lab of science for elementary school students

The purpose of this study is to explore the learning effect related to different learning styles in a Web-based virtual science laboratory for elementary school students. The online virtual lab allows teachers to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) into science lessons. The results of this experimental teaching method demonstrate that: (a) students in the experimental group using the online virtual lab achieved better grades than those in the control group under traditional class instruction, (b) in the experimental group, grade achievements of students having different learning styles were not significantly different from each other leading us to conclude that the Web-based virtual learning environment is suitable for various learning styles, (c) students with the “accommodator” learning style made the most significant achievements in this study, the scores obtained by the experimental group being remarkably better than those in the control group, and (d) up to 75% of the students surveyed indicated that they preferred using the Web-based virtual lab to reading textbooks only. The results of the experimental teaching and the survey show the feasibility and effectiveness of the Web-based learning environment being studied. It encourages further development of the Web-based virtual lab.     

Faculty Begin to Replace Textbooks with “Freely” Accessible Online Resources

ABSTRACT

More and more students are financially unable to acquire, or deliberately choose to go without course textbooks. A variety of commercial and noncommercial initiatives have materialized to address the student success challenge of learning material access inequality in the classroom. There is a gap between how higher education faculty plan to teach a course and the actual learning environment that exists in practice. Faculty are beginning to experiment with freely available and licensed library materials as a substitute for commercial textbooks and course packages to address the failure of textbook publishers to reach a price point that entices students to buy textbooks. The results thus far are promising. Some courses can be delivered today using only “freely available” learning resources, some using a mix of fee based and free, while others cannot be delivered using any freely available resources at all due to a lack of availability.     

Learning without lectures: a case study

During a 1995-1996 sabbatical, the authors' long-standing concern about discrepancies between their teaching philosophies and classroom practices reached a crisis. As a result, they decided to offer the fall 1996 Introduction to Psychology course on the World Wide Web. There were several issues to think about. First, the authors saw the potential for a huge impact, since 80 to 85 percent of North Dakota State University students enrol in Psych110, most within their first two years. Second, they decided to design the course so that it could be offered for off-campus distance learning as well as on-campus resident instruction. Third, they decided to minimize overhead for students by using only a Web browser, e-mail, a textbook, and the textbook publisher's demonstration/simulation software. Fourth, they chose to base decisions about course components on published literature covering cognition and teaching. Finally, they built in mid term and final student course evaluation components and a field experiment comparing student attitudes and learning outcome for online versus lecture classes     

Effect of in-app components,medium, and screen size of electronic textbooks on reading performance,behavior, and perception

Although many app-based textbooks are available for students, reading have not been thoroughly outlined. This study aimed to understand how changes from paper to electronic textbooks have affected the academic reading task, investigate student users’ perceptions of in-app components and screen sizes, and identify issues affecting in-app components and task requirements. A mixed factorial design experiment was employed. Results showed that there were no significant changes in comprehension and time spent reading between print text and the iPad. Yet, student highlighting, notetaking, and reading behavior and perception significantly changed based on condition. In addition, students struggled to use in-app components and found them frustrating especially when accounting for sentence splitting. The findings presented can assist in understanding the changes in student reading behavior, which can be used to improve interface design of future e-textbooks.     

The acceptance of Moodle technology by business administration students

The advent of information technologies to Universities has improved the teaching-learning process. Students can increase their learning skills using information technology. Those using the Moodle platform regularly seem to get better grades than those who rarely or never use it.This paper analyzes students’ intention to use Moodle platforms to improve the teaching-learning process. Its main focus is to analyze the use of the Moodle platform by University students, identifying factors which might influence the intention to use it. Understanding the factors influencing the intention to use Moodle will allow us to determine which actions might be carried out to boost its use by University students, to therefore, improve both their skills and grades.The theoretical grounding for this research is the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). TAM specifies the causal relationships between perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and actual usage behavior. The proposed model has six constructs and nine hypotheses have been generated from the connections between these six constructs. These constructs include perceived compatibility with student tasks, perceived usefulness for professors, and training. Our results provide support for a number of relationships in the hypothesized model. In light of these findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

E-books or textbooks: Students prefer textbooks

Previous research has demonstrated that the experience of reading e-books is not equivalent to reading textbooks. This study examines factors influencing preference for e-books as well as reported use of e-book content. Although the present student cohort is the most technologically savvy to ever enter universities, students do not prefer e-books over textbooks regardless of their gender, computer use or comfort with computers. No significant correlations existed between the number of e-books previously used and overall preference of e-books: Participants who had previously used an e-book still preferred print texts for learning. Despite the ability to easily access supplemental content through e-books via hyperlinks and other features, students were more likely to use special features in print books than in e-books.     

Do students need teacher’s initiation in online collaborative learning?

As more and more people use computers to complete their work and solve problems in the workplace, computing education is emphasized for students of all levels and disciplines in Taiwan. However, the computing education in Taiwan can hardly be recognized as effective and satisfactory. Many inappropriate examples that lack context are used in teaching and textbooks that may result in employees with low competence and insufficient ability for collaborative working. Students who grow up in this learning context usually lack the ability to seek information and solve problems by themselves. In this regard, the author redesigned a course and adopted online collaborative learning with initiation to establish the essential knowledge for students’ collaboration in the initial stage of a course. This study conducted an experiment that included 169 undergraduates from three class sections – the first two from an academic university (Case 1, n = 68; Case 2, n = 68) and the last one from a university of science and technology (Case 3, n = 33) – taught by the same teacher under the same course name and the same course website. The results show that students who received online collaborative learning with initiation had higher grades than those without. The author further discusses the implications for teachers, schools, and scholars who plan to provide online courses for their students, particularly computing courses.     

The effect of simulation games on the learning of computational problem solving

Simulation games are now increasingly applied to many subject domains as they allow students to engage in discovery processes, and may facilitate a flow learning experience. However, the relationship between learning experiences and problem solving strategies in simulation games still remains unclear in the literature. This study, thus, analyzed the feedback and problem solving behaviors of 117 students in a simulation game, designed to assist them to learn computational problem solving. It was found that students when learning computational problem solving with the game were more likely to perceive a flow learning experience than in traditional lectures. The students’ intrinsic motivation was also enhanced when they learned with the simulation game. In particular, the results of the study found a close association between the students’ learning experience states and their problem solving strategies. The students who perceived a flow experience state frequently applied trial-and-error, learning-by-example, and analytical reasoning strategies to learn the computational problem solving skills. However, a certain portion of students who experienced states of boredom and anxiety did not demonstrate in-depth problem solving strategies. For instance, the students who felt anxious in the simulation game did not apply the learning-by-example strategy as frequently as those in the flow state. In addition, the students who felt bored in the simulation game only learned to solve the problem at a superficial level.     

Student perceptions of collaborative learning,social presence and satisfaction in a blended learning environment: Relationships and critical factors

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of the students’ perceived levels of collaborative learning, social presence and overall satisfaction in a blended learning environment. This research studied the relationship of these three variables and identified critical factors related to them. The participants were 48 graduate students who took a blended-format course in health education and worked on a collaborative group project related to the development of a comprehensive HIV-AIDS prevention plan. Data was collected from the Student Perception Questionnaire and face-to-face interviews. The analysis of quantitative data indicated that student perceptions of collaborative learning have statistically positive relationships with perceptions of social presence and satisfaction. This means that students who perceived high levels of collaborative learning tended to be more satisfied with their distance course than those who perceived low levels of collaborative learning. Similarly, students with high perceptions of collaborative learning perceived high levels of social presence as well. Surprisingly, the relationship between social presence and overall satisfaction was positive but not statistically significant. Interview data revealed that (a) course structure, (b) emotional support, and (c) communication medium were critical factors associated with student perceptions of collaborative learning, social presence, and satisfaction. Explanations about findings and implications for instructional design are discussed in the conclusion.     

The effects of computer games on primary school students’ achievement and motivation in geography learning

The implementation of a computer game for learning about geography by primary school students is the focus of this article. Researchers designed and developed a three-dimensional educational computer game. Twenty four students in fourth and fifth grades in a private school in Ankara, Turkey learnt about world continents and countries through this game for three weeks. The effects of the game environment on students’ achievement and motivation and related implementation issues were examined through both quantitative and qualitative methods. An analysis of pre and post achievement tests showed that students made significant learning gains by participating in the game-based learning environment. When comparing their motivations while learning in the game-based learning environment and in their traditional school environment, it was found that students demonstrated statistically significant higher intrinsic motivations and statistically significant lower extrinsic motivations learning in the game-based environment. In addition, they had decreased focus on getting grades and they were more independent while participating in the game-based activities. These positive effects on learning and motivation, and the positive attitudes of students and teachers suggest that computer games can be used as an ICT tool in formal learning environments to support students in effective geography learning.     

Is the effectiveness of lecture capture related to teaching approach or content type?

The purpose of two related studies was to explore the relationships between course characteristics (teaching approach, content type, and level of curricular coordination), lecture-capture implementation, and learning in a veterinary medical education environment. Two hundred and twenty two students and 35 faculty members participated in the first study, which surveyed respondents regarding their perception of lecture-capture use and impact on learning. Four hundred and ninety one students participated in the second study, which compared scores on a standardized test of basic science knowledge among groups experiencing various levels of lecture-capture implementation. Students were most likely to view captured lectures in courses that moved quickly, relied heavily on lecture, were perceived as highly relevant to their future success, and contained information not available in other formats. A greater percentage of students than faculty perceived lecture capture as beneficial to learning. Higher views of captured lectures were associated with higher test scores in disciplines that relied most heavily on a straight-lecture teaching approach and had a basic science – research teaching context. The number of lecture-capture views was not significantly related to test scores in disciplines that relied less heavily on straight lecture for instruction and had a basic science – applied teaching context.     

Digital natives,better learners? Students’ beliefs about how the Internet influenced their ability to learn

In the literature students are sometimes assumed to feel empowered with respect to learning because of their familiarity with and access to ICT. However, after interviewing 25 students from post-elementary schools, it was found that the majority of the students, although they use the Internet and other ICT for school purposes, believed that their generation is not as good at learning as the pre-ICT generation. Several students explained the situation in terms of the school’s failure to build on their abilities. Nonetheless, the majority believed that the Internet over-simplifies schoolwork (perceived primarily as the traditional processing of textual sources), which in turn diminishes learning abilities. These results carry important implications regarding school, given that low self-efficacy might make students less likely to apply themselves to learning.     

Effects of the heterogeneity of game complexity and user population in learning performance of business simulation games

Previous studies on business simulation games (BSGs) have concluded that improved performance may not be the primary benefit of using BSGs, due to mixed results between student performance and perceptions. Two relevant and insightful issues attract our attention, namely, the impacts of the heterogeneous student population and the different complexity levels of BSG software. To address these issues, the present study aims to understand the relationship between student profile/characteristics and performance in the classroom with BSG-facilitated learning. An in-depth case study is conducted on a general college course designed to teach three different complexities of BSGs to students enrolled in different majors. Four student profile factors are individually tested for differences in performance scores as evaluated by the teacher. Additionally, the influences of 11 student characteristics are assessed with regard their self-reported perceived learning performances. Regression analysis and ANOVA are used to investigate the impacts of heterogeneous users and game complexity on student performance. Based on the regression analyses of the data collected from 43 respondents who participated in the general course, the study concludes that knowledge and skill may influence the heterogeneous student population; moreover, student participation and tacit learning preference improve performance, and students with an auditory learning preference or high learning motivation may not perform well in classroom BSG learning. However, the low value of adjusted R square implies that more dimensions or variables are needed to increase the explaining power of the performance scores in the regression analyses. In contrast, heterogeneous BSG software with different complexity levels present different results. The current research contributes practical and incremental knowledge on the complexity of heterogeneous BSG software on performance scores and the perceived learning performance of heterogeneous student populations. With the research limitations acknowledged, a series of suggestions for teachers pertaining to appropriate applications of BSGs in classes is offered as well as recommendations to BSG providers. Nevertheless, in-depth analyses are required, preferably with larger student population samples, to further explore the insignificant relationship between student perceptions and attitude under nonlinear extended complexity.     

Using animation to support the teaching of computer game development techniques

In this paper, we examine the potential use of animation for supporting the teaching of some of the mathematical concepts that underlie computer games development activities, such as vector and matrix algebra. An experiment was conducted with a group of UK undergraduate computing students to compare the perceived usefulness of animated and static learning materials for teaching such concepts. Undergraduate computer game development courses are currently a growing area of UK higher education. Computer game development can often involve the use of mathematical modelling of two-dimensional and three-dimensional computer game objects and their interactions. Overall, it appeared that animated learning materials appeared to be perceived as being more useful to undergraduate computer games students than traditional learning materials for learning such concepts.     

Measuring the impact of a blended learning model on early literacy growth

In the context of trying to improve reading proficiency in elementary school students, this study investigated the use of digital technology as part of a blended learning program, Core5, in kindergarten and first grade classes. A quasi-experimental design compared 283 treatment students instructed in schools using Core5 with 237 control students in schools using traditional instruction in an urban school district. At the beginning of the school year, all students were pretested with Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), a commonly used reading assessment. During the school year, the treatment schools implemented Core5, which includes the online component and offline teacher-led lessons. The English Language Arts curriculum was evaluated and found to be similar across treatment and control schools. At the end of the school year, all students were post-tested with DIBELS. Results from propensity score analyses showed that treatment students outperformed control students and that the discrepancy between treatment and control groups on post-test scores was more pronounced when students had lower pretest scores. These outcomes point to the value of using Core5 for reading instruction in early elementary grades.