Integrating affective learning into intelligent tutoring systems

Affectivity has influence in learning face-to-face environments and improves some aspects in students, such as motivation. For that reason, it is important to integrate affectivity elements into virtual environments. We propose a conceptual model that suggests which elements of tutor, student and dialogue should be integrated and implemented into learning systems. We design an ontology guided by methontology, and apply a mathematical evaluation (OntoQA) to determine the richness of the proposed model. The mathematical evaluation states that the proposed model has relationship richness and horizontal nature. We developed a software application implementing the conceptual model in order to prove its effectivity to generate students’ motivation. The findings suggest that the implemented affective learning ontology impacts positively the motivation in students with low academic performance, in female students and in engineering students.     

A multilevel analysis of the effects of external rewards on elementary students' motivation,engagement and learning in an educational game

This study investigated the effects of external rewards on fifth graders' motivation, engagement and learning while playing an educational game. We were interested in exploring whether the feedback-rich environment of the game could mitigate the predicted negative effects of external rewards. Data of students' engagement and learning were collected and analyzed at multiple levels. A quasi-experimental design was used to examine the effect of external rewards in one group (n = 50) compared to a control group without such rewards (n = 56). According to the results, the external rewards did not undermine students' motivation (e.g., at proximal and distal levels), however they did not foster disciplinary engagement. On the other hand, students in the reward condition showed significantly larger gains in conceptual understanding (proximal) and non-significantly larger gains in achievement (distal). These results suggest that the predicted negative consequences of external rewards may be addressed in this new generation of learning environments. Future research and contributions of the study are provided.     

Analysing the role of a pedagogical agent in psychological and cognitive preparatory activities

There is a lack of studies that examine the role of a pedagogical agent on student development in a specific learning situation that involves psychological and cognitive preparatory activities in high school settings. We examined the effectiveness of pedagogical agent (APT) cognitive and affective feedback on learner motivation and well-being. We applied an experimental research design, involving 45 fourth-year high school students, divided in experimental and control groups (APT vs. human tutor). We performed a quantitative analysis to collect and analyse data of students using our APT. APT cognitive feedback had a positive effect on students' motivation for learning by encouraging students' proposals and initiatives and arousing students' interest in the topic. In addition, APT affective feedback fostered an appropriate emotional climate and creative environment for learning by enhancing students' curiosity, creativity and confidence for carrying out the activity, while reducing students' negative emotions such as boredom and anger. This study provided us useful insights about the affective (and cognitive) competencies that a virtual affective pedagogical agent needs to have in order to support students' mental and emotional health throughout a learning situation. Yet, further research is needed to consolidate these findings and make APT more adaptive to different learning situations.     

Exploring the role of e-learning readiness on student satisfaction and motivation in flipped classroom

Decrease in student satisfaction and motivation in flipped classroom (FC) model of instruction is among frequently observed problems. And these problems could reduce the efficiency of FC model. It is believed that the problems related to student satisfaction and motivation in FC model of instruction are related to the e-learning readiness of the students. The purpose of the current study was to explore the impact of the e-learning readiness of the students on student satisfaction and motivation in FC model of instruction. The study was carried out with 236 undergraduate students taking Computing I class taught using FC model of instruction. Data were collected from three self-report instruments: E-learning Readiness Scale (subscales: ‘computer self-efficacy’, ‘internet self-efficacy’, ‘online communication self-efficacy’, ‘self-directed learning’, ‘learner control’ and ‘motivation towards e-learning’), Satisfaction Scale and Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. The path analyses with structural equation modelling (SEM) further verified that students' e-learning readiness were related to their satisfaction and motivation while undertaking academic tasks in FC model of instruction. The results of the study indicated that students' e-learning readiness was a significant predictor of their satisfaction and motivation in FC model of instruction. Findings were presented and discussed for future studies and applications.     

Student engagement with mobile-based assessment systems: A survival analysis

Research on mobile-based assessment systems is still an emerging topic in the mobile learning field. Current research has demonstrated that the use of mobile-based assessment systems seems to have a positive impact on students' learning outcomes and motivation. The paper identifies some factors that influence student engagement with mobile-based formative assessment in a language learning course. Survival analysis of the interaction of N = 86 students from eight English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses over 5 weeks showed that students with higher levels of self-reported effort and perceived importance engaged for longer periods of time. Perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and behavioural intention to use were all predictors of the longer use of mobile-based assessment systems. We found that within the first 25–50 min of use, about half of the students might disengage from using a mobile-based assessment application.     

Use of blogs in pre-service teacher education to improve student engagement

Web 2.0 technologies allow average computer users to be able to publish on the Internet without having to know complex computer technical knowledge, which gives these technologies powerful potential to facilitate student engagement in various learning environments. However, a knowledge gap exists in the literature related to factors affecting student engagement with Web 2.0 technologies. The purpose of this study is to understand factors affecting student engagement in a pre-service teacher education program that uses blogs to expand in-class discussions about technology integration. First year pre-service teachers in a mathematics education department participated in the study. Data were collected with a survey that was developed to measure student engagement with blog use. Results show that student motivation, reasons to use blog in the course, and level of challenge perceived by the students affect students' engagement with blog use. Gender and technical ability of students do not impact students' engagement. As a result, blogs can be utilized to expand in-class discussions equally well for all students.     

Assessing the effects of interactive blogging on student attitudes towards peer interaction,learning motivation,and academic achievements

Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi‐experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.     

Exploring feedback and student characteristics relevant for personalizing feedback strategies

Personalized tutoring feedback is a powerful method that expert human tutors apply when helping students to optimize their learning. Thus, research on tutoring feedback strategies tailoring feedback according to important factors of the learning process has been recognized as a promising issue in the field of computer-based adaptive educational technologies. Our paper seeks to contribute to this area of research by addressing the following aspects: First, to investigate how students' gender, prior knowledge, and motivational characteristics relate to learning outcomes (knowledge gain and changes in motivation). Second, to investigate the impact of these student characteristics on how tutoring feedback strategies varying in content (procedural vs. conceptual) and specificity (concise hints vs. elaborated explanations) of tutoring feedback messages affect students' learning and motivation. Third, to explore the influence of the feedback parameters and student characteristics on students' immediate post-feedback behaviour (skipping vs. trying to accomplish a task, and failing vs. succeeding in providing a correct answer). To address these issues, detailed log-file analyses of an experimental study have been conducted. In this study, 124 sixth and seventh graders have been exposed to various tutoring feedback strategies while working on multi-trial error correction tasks in the domain of fraction arithmetic. The web-based intelligent learning environment ActiveMath was used to present the fraction tasks and trace students' progress and activities. The results reveal that gender is an important factor for feedback efficiency: Male students achieve significantly lower knowledge gains than female students under all tutoring feedback conditions (particularly, under feedback strategies starting with a conceptual hint). Moreover, perceived competence declines from pre- to post-test significantly more for boys than for girls. Yet, the decline in perceived competence is not accompanied by a decline in intrinsic motivation, which, instead, increases significantly from pre- to post-test. With regard to the post-feedback behaviour, the results indicate that students skip further attempts more frequently after conceptual than after procedural feedback messages.     

A contextual game-based learning approach to improving students' inquiry-based learning performance in social studies courses

Inquiry-based learning, an effective instructional strategy, can be in the form of a problem or task for triggering student engagement. However, how to situate students in meaningful inquiry activities remains to be settled, especially for social studies courses. In this study, a contextual educational computer game is developed to improve students' learning performance based on an inquiry-based learning strategy. An experiment has been conducted on an elementary school social studies course to evaluate the effects of the proposed approach on the inquiry-based learning performances of students with different learning styles. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach effectively enhanced the students' learning effects in terms of their learning achievement, learning motivation, satisfaction degree and flow state. Furthermore, it is also found that the proposed approach benefited the “active” learning style students more than the “reflective” style students in terms of learning achievement. This suggests the need to provide additional supports to students with particular learning styles in the future.     

Technology use,self-directed learning,student engagement and academic performance: Examining the interrelations

The widespread technology use among current college and university students has made higher educational institutions worldwide acknowledge the need of incorporating it in teaching and learning for explicit reasons. But does access and usage of technology enhance academic performance and foster student engagement in reality? Researches in the last over two decades have conjectured both the positive and negative outcomes of the students’ continuous interface with technology. Student engagement and self-directed learning (SDL) are the two other themes that have independently attracted considerable interest of researchers, ascribable to the explicit and implicit assertions that both are related to the academic success. Additionally, the relationship of technology use with these two academic behaviors have also been investigated although not very extensively. The current study aimed to inspect a path model with technology use, student engagement, self-directed learning and academic performance among undergraduate students. 761 students responded to an online survey comprising three scales: Media and Technology Usage and Attitude Scale (MTUAS), Self-Rating Scale of Self-Directed Learning (SRSSDL), and student version of Utrecht’s Work Engagement Scale (UWES-S). The results showed that use of technology has a direct positive relationship with students’ engagement and self-directed learning, however, no significant direct effect was found between technology use and academic performance. The findings point towards the complex interchange of relationships of the students’ technology use with student engagement, self-directed learning and academic performance. The implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Cracking her codes: understanding shared technology resources as positioning artifacts for power and status in CSCL environments

There is a positive relationship between student participation in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments and improved complex problem-solving strategies, increased learning gains, higher engagement in the thinking of their peers, and an enthusiastic disposition toward groupwork. However, student participation varies from group to group, even in contexts where students and teachers have had extensive training in working together. In this study, we use positioning theory and interaction analysis to conceptualize and investigate relationships between student interactions across two partner pairs working with technology in an all-female cryptography summer camp and their negotiated positions of power and status. The analysis resulted in uneven participation patterns, unequal status orderings, and an imbalance of power in both comparison cases. We found a reflexive relationship between partner interactions around shared technology resources and negotiated positions of power and status, which leads us to conclude that interactions around technology function as an important indicator of negotiated positionings of power and status in CSCL settings, and vice-versa. With that said, we found qualitative differences in the ways emergent status problems impacted each team’s productivity with the cryptography challenge, which has important implications for future research on CSCL settings and classroom practice.     

The structure of student engagement in online learning: A bi-factor exploratory structural equation modelling approach

Enhancing student engagement plays a critical role in reducing student drop-out rate in online learning as students usually feel isolated and disconnected in this learning environment. This requires a clear conceptualization of the student engagement construct and its underlying structure. However, the conceptual understanding of the student engagement construct has long been impeded by the inconsistency in its multidimensional structure and the conceptual ambiguity among its components. This study aims to examine the underlying structure of student engagement in online learning based on the bi-factor exploratory structure equation modelling framework (B-ESEM). Four competing models representing the underlying structure of student engagement in online learning were compared based on their degree of fit to survey data from 363 students in an online undergraduate program. Students' responses to the online learning engagement questionnaire were best represented by a B-ESEM model that provided simultaneous assessment of a global engagement factor and specific factors of behavioural, cognitive, affective and social engagement while controlling for item cross-loadings. However, behavioural engagement only retained limited specificity once the global engagement factor was taken into account. The study findings offer a solution to reconcile the inconsistency in the multidimensional structure of student engagement and reduce the conceptual ambiguity among its components, thus contribute to better measuring student engagement in online learning.     

Engaging online learners: The impact of Web-based learning technology on college student engagement

Widespread use of the Web and other Internet technologies in postsecondary education has exploded in the last 15 years. Using a set of items developed by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the researchers utilized the hierarchical linear model (HLM) and multiple regressions to investigate the impact of Web-based learning technology on student engagement and self-reported learning outcomes in face-to-face and online learning environments. The results show a general positive relationship between the use the learning technology and student engagement and learning outcomes. We also discuss the possible impact on minority and part-time students as they are more likely to enroll in online courses.     

Enhancing middle school students' scientific learning and motivation through agent‐based learning

Facing students' decreasing motivation to pursue scientific study, schools and educators need to coordinate new technologies with pedagogical agents to effectively sustain or promote students' scientific learning and motivation to learn. Although the provision of pedagogical agents in student learning has been studied previously, it is not clear what benefits the strategy might offer with regard to student motivation. This study proposes an agent‐based mechanism that integrates problem‐solving and inquiry‐based instructions to help students better understand complex scientific concepts and to sustain their motivation to learn science. In this study, a quasi‐experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance and feasibility of our proposed mechanism. The results revealed that the agent‐based mechanism was effective and feasible for enhancing students' learning and motivation to learn. The mechanism was associated with increases in the acquisition of knowledge when compared with the control group. Its effect in promoting and sustaining students' motivation was also statistically significant. Detailed discussions of the findings are provided in this study.     

Can learning be virtually boosted? An investigation of online social networking impacts

Online social networking has deeply penetrated university campuses, influencing multiple aspects of student life. We investigate the impacts of individual online social networking engagement (e.g., on Facebook) from a pedagogical standpoint. Based on social learning theory, we argue that two socialization processes, social acceptance and acculturation, bridge individual online social networking engagement with three domains of social learning outcomes. Results from a survey accompanied by focus group discussions demonstrate the substantial impacts of university student online social networking engagement on social learning processes and outcomes. Online social networking not only directly influences university students’ learning outcomes, but also helps the students attain social acceptance from others and adapt to university culture, both of which play prominent roles in improving their learning outcomes.     

Designing an adaptive web-based learning system based on students’ cognitive styles identified online

This study developed an adaptive web-based learning system focusing on students’ cognitive styles. The system is composed of a student model and an adaptation model. It collected students’ browsing behaviors to update the student model for unobtrusively identifying student cognitive styles through a multi-layer feed-forward neural network (MLFF). The MLFF was adopted because of its ability on imprecise or incompletely understood data, ability to generalize and learn from specific examples, ability to be quickly updated with extra parameters, and speed in execution making them ideal for real time applications. The system then adaptively recommended learning content presented with a variety of content and interactive components through the adaptation model based on the student cognitive style identified in the student model. The adaptive web interfaces were designed by investigating the relationships between students’ cognitive styles and browsing patterns of content and interactive components. Training of the MLFF and an experiment were conducted to examine the accuracy of identifying students’ cognitive styles during browsing with the proposed MLFF and the impact of the proposed adaptive web-based system on students’ engagement in learning. The training results of the MLFF showed that the proposed system could identify students’ cognitive styles with high accuracy and the temporal effects should be considered while identifying students’ cognitive styles during browsing. Two factors, the acknowledgment of students’ cognitive styles while browsing and the existence of adaptive web interfaces, were used to assign three classes of college freshmen into three groups. The experimental results revealed that the proposed system could have significant impacts on temporal effects on students’ engagement in learning, not only for students with cognitive styles known before browsing, but also for students with cognitive styles identified during browsing. The results provide evidence of the effectiveness of the adaptive web-based learning system with students’ cognitive styles dynamically identified during browsing, thus validating the research purposes of this study.     

Research in online learning environments: Priorities and methodologies

Due to increasing demand for education and training in the information age, online learning and teaching is becoming a necessity in our future. However, lack of research goals to understand impact of online learning environments on students is a problem in research on online learning environments. We identified four main research goals to pursue in online learning environments based on their impact on learner achievement, engagement, and retention (opposite of attrition). Those goals are (a) enhancing learner engagement & collaboration, (b) promoting effective facilitation, (c) developing assessment techniques, and (d) designing faculty development programs. Current promising work in those areas is presented. Four methods that are common in the instructional technology literature are recommended to pursue those goals. Formative research and developmental research are relevant for all four. Although appropriate for any of the goals, experimental research is a better fit for goals b and c, and activity theory is useful for goals a and b.     

Toward Spoken Human–Computer Tutorial Dialogues

Oral discourse is the primary form of human–human communication, hence, computer interfaces that communicate via unstructured spoken dialogues will presumably provide a more efficient, meaningful, and naturalistic interaction experience. Within the context of learning environments, there are theoretical positions supporting a speech facilitation hypothesis that predicts that spoken tutorial dialogues will increase learning more than typed dialogues. We evaluated this hypothesis in an experiment where 24 participants learned computer literacy via a spoken and a typed conversation with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with conversational dialogues. The results indicated that (a) enhanced content coverage was achieved in the spoken condition; (b) learning gains for both modalities were on par and greater than a no-instruction control; (c) although speech recognition errors were unrelated to learning gains, they were linked to participants' evaluations of the tutor; (d) participants adjusted their conversational styles when speaking compared to typing; (e) semantic and statistical natural language understanding approaches to comprehending learners' responses were more resilient to speech recognition errors than syntactic and symbolic-based approaches; and (f) simulated speech recognition errors had differential impacts on the fidelity of different semantic algorithms. We discuss the impact of our findings on the speech facilitation hypothesis and on human–computer interfaces that support spoken dialogues.     

Comparison of 1:1 and 1:m CSCL environment for collaborative concept mapping

This paper reports an investigation into the effects of collaborative concept mapping in a digital learning environment, in terms of students' overall learning gains, knowledge retention, quality of student artefacts (the collaboratively created concept maps), interactive patterns, and learning perceptions. Sixty‐four 12‐year‐old students from two 6th grade classes (32 from each class) participated in the study. Guided by the methodology of quasi‐experimental research, group scribbles 1.0 was adopted in which students carried out collaborative concept mapping activities for social studies in two different settings: (1) 1:1 (one‐device‐per‐student) – students working in pairs with one Tablet PC assigned to each of them; and (2) 1:m (one‐device‐to‐many‐students) – multiple students sharing a Tablet PC. Both settings were evaluated and the interactional patterns of the student groups' concept mapping were identified. The results indicated that in both 1:1 and 1:m settings, students had improved their learning results and retention. Nevertheless, while 1:1 groups had demonstrated more consistency in group participation, improved communication and interaction, the 1:m groups had instead generated superior artefacts as all the notes were well discussed among the group members. The findings suggest that a higher quality of collaborative processes does not necessarily lead to improved student artefacts.     

The influence of student characteristics on the use of adaptive e-learning material

Adaptive e-learning materials can help teachers to educate heterogeneous student groups. This study provides empirical data about the way academic students differ in their learning when using adaptive e-learning materials. Ninety-four students participated in the study. We determined characteristics in a heterogeneous student group by collecting demographic data and measuring motivation and prior knowledge. We also measured the learning paths students followed and learning strategies they used when working with adaptive e-learning material in a molecular biology course. We then combined these data to study if and how student characteristics relate to the learning paths and strategies they used. We observed that students did follow different learning paths. Gender did not have an effect, but (mainly Dutch) BSc students differed from (international) MSc students in the intrinsic motivation they had and the learning paths and strategies they followed when using the adaptive e-learning material.