Synthetic emotion

New research in affective computing-computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion-aims to give computers skills of emotional intelligence. These skills are crucial for learning and for savvy social interaction. For example, recognizing someone's emotional response is key to sensing if what you have just done or said met with approval or disapproval, interest or boredom, confusion or understanding. Computers are increasingly verbal and have formidable computational abilities, but still they cannot see if the graphics they are displaying delight or bore the viewer. The author considers how computers might get better at recognizing emotion     

Exploring dimensions to online learning

The study presented in this paper sought to explore several dimensions to online learning. Identifying the dimensions to online learning entails important basic issues which are of great relevance to educators today. The primary question is “what are the factors that contribute to the success/failure of online learning?” In order to answer this question, we need to identify the important variables that: (1) measure the learning outcome and (2) help us understand the learning experience of students using specific learning tools. In this study, the dimensions we explored are student’s attitude, affect, motivation and perception of an Online Learning Tool usage. A survey methodology was used such that validated items from previous relevant research work were adopted. 105 students completed the questionnaire. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was implemented on the data captured. Results of the EFA identified the items that are relevant to the present context and the items that can be used to measure the dimension to online learning. Affect and perception were found to have strong measurement capabilities with the adopted items while motivation was measured the weakest.     

Can structured representation enhance students' thinking skills for better understanding of E-learning content?

This paper proposes an e-learning model to assess the effects of online structured representation of content on learners' understanding. We designed a structured representation based on the theory of distributed cognition that provides seven segments for reading research articles. The study hypothesized that motivation, attention, and interactivity are essential factors that affect students' thinking skills for understanding e-learning content. To investigate and confirm the effect of these factors on the students' thinking skills, we designed a survey and analyzed the responses of 210 university students concerning the proposed structured representation. The results revealed that motivation, attention, and interactivity did contribute to the students' thinking skills. They also demonstrated that the structured representation helped students achieve an adequate level of thinking skills as they read research articles, which had a positive effect on their understanding. This finding demonstrates that structured representation has significant potential as a learning tool and that structure-based e-learning can influence students' metacognitive activities and facilitate their understanding.     

A study of engaging high-school students as multimedia designers in a cognitive apprenticeship-style learning environment

Educational theory and research have indicated vast potentials of engaging learners as designers. Yet we have much to learn about how to design such a learning environment effectively. This paper reports on a year-long study of investigating how a cognitive apprenticeship-based learner-as-multimedia-designer environment could enhance high-school students' motivation and learning of design knowledge. The study showed that, after participating in such an environment, students became intrinsically more motivated and had more self-confidence. They acquired better understanding of several important design skills. The results indicated that working with a client and designing for a real audience helped to bring about bigger changes in the students' motivation and design knowledge. The study also highlighted the challenges and factors important for designing such a learning environment.     

A review of recent advances in learner and skill modeling in intelligent learning environments

In recent years, learner models have emerged from the research laboratory and research classrooms into the wider world. Learner models are now embedded in real world applications which can claim to have thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of users. Probabilistic models for skill assessment are playing a key role in these advanced learning environments. In this paper, we review the learner models that have played the largest roles in the success of these learning environments, and also the latest advances in the modeling and assessment of learner skills. We conclude by discussing related advancements in modeling other key constructs such as learner motivation, emotional and attentional state, meta-cognition and self-regulated learning, group learning, and the recent movement towards open and shared learner models.     

Mobile learning: Two case studies of supporting inquiry learning in informal and semiformal settings

Mobile technologies can support learning across different contexts as their portability enables them to be used by the learner in whichever context she or he is in. They can be particularly beneficial in informal and semiformal contexts where learners have more control over their learning goals and where motivation is often high. Inquiries in informal contexts are likely to be personally relevant in terms of topics of interest and capitalise on learners' location as learners decide what, where, when and whether to learn. There is considerable interest in how such benefits can be harnessed for more formal learning and one challenge is how to make inquiries personally relevant in such contexts. However, there is little literature that considers the structure needed to support informal and semiformal inquiry learning. This paper contributes to that literature by examining dimensions for researchers and designers to consider investigating or developing support for inquiries in informal or semiformal settings.The paper examines two case studies of inquiry learning in contrasting settings in order to understand more about learner control and how technology can support learners' inquiries. Case study one considers the use of web based software to support science inquiry learning by 14–15 year olds in a semiformal context, whilst the second case study reports on informal adult learners using their own mobile technologies to learn about landscape. These case studies are compared and contrasted in terms of the dimensions of learner control, location of learning, and the different support mechanisms for inquiry learning and a framework is proposed for considering these dimensions.     

Exploring the effects of emotional design and emotional intelligence in multimedia-based learning: an engineering educational perspective

ABSTRACT

Emotions are an important aspect in learning and with the current boom in instructional technology, researchers are exploring methods to investigate how emotions may be manipulated to positively influence online learning. One such method is by adapting the theory of emotional design through multimedia elements. This theory emphasises on individuality and metacognition in exploring these learning outcomes and by this we choose to explore the effects of emotional intelligence (EI). We replicated the methodology used in previous research studies in emotional design in multimedia learning by further exploring the gaps from those studies especially the effects of negative design, EI and a new sample that primarily focusses on engineering undergraduates in Malaysia. This study was designed as a quantitative quasi-experimental using a 3?×?2 factorial design. Based on the findings, it was found that emotional design is a better predictor of cognitive outcomes, whereas EI was a better predictor of emotional outcomes such as motivation and satisfaction for multimedia-based learning. It was also found that positive and negative designs have similar effects on students’ learning outcomes, while EI affected perceived satisfaction in each design.     

Emotional design in multimedia learning: Differentiation on relevant design features and their effects on emotions and learning

Previous research into multimedia learning has mainly focused on cognitive factors to investigate different instructional conditions and design principles. Emotional factors have so far been widely neglected. However, recent studies showed that the emotional design of multimedia learning material can evoke positive emotions in learners that in turn facilitate the learning process. Following this lead, our study aims to further explore the potential of an emotional design. We seek to differentiate the current findings by systematically deducing emotionally relevant design features and also taking into account negative emotional states. In order to deduce relevant design features, we adopt concepts from web design. German college students (N = 334) were assigned to one of nine conditions, created by two design factors (classical vs. expressive aesthetics), each with two levels (high vs. low) and a usability factor (high vs. low usability) as well as a control group (no color/gray scale). Unexpectedly, objective differences in aesthetics or usability did not affect learners’ emotional states. However, the perceived aesthetics and usability positively affected the emotional states of the learners. Learners’ emotional states had a minor impact on learning outcomes but a larger impact on learners’ intrinsic motivation, including the motivation to continue working with the material.     

Computer-supported team-based learning: The impact of motivation,enjoyment and team contributions on learning outcomes

The benefits of teamwork and collaboration have long been advocated by many educational theories, such as constructivist and social learning models. Among the various applications of collaborative learning, the iterative team-based learning (TBL) process proposed by Michaelsen, Fink, and Knight (2002) has been successfully used in the classroom without computer support. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation results of a classroom application of the TBL process, which was modified to include computer mediation. We call this process computer-supported team-based learning (CS-TBL). This work extends learning in small teams from the traditional classroom to the hybrid classroom where students meet both face-to-face and online by emphasizing the importance of online team interactions. The outcomes are assessed through an evaluation model that considers the impact of motivation, enjoyment and team contributions on learning outcomes. The study results indicate that motivation influences the relationship between team interactions and perceived learning. Enjoyment is affected by motivation and perceptions of team members’ contributions, with the implication that students who perceive that the team interactions are adding value to their education will better enjoy learning and will experience higher-level learning outcomes.     

Some insights into the impact of affective information when delivering feedback to students

ABSTRACT

The relation between affect-driven feedback and engagement on a given task has been largely investigated. This relation can be used to make personalised instructional decisions and/or modify the affect content within the feedback. However, although it is generally assumed that providing encouraging feedback to students should help them adopt a state of flow, there are instances where those messages might result counterproductive. In this paper, we present a case study with 48 secondary school students using an Intelligent Tutoring System for arithmetical word problem solving. This system, which makes some common assumptions on how to relate affective state with performance, takes into account subjective (user's affective state) and objective information (previous problem performance) to decide the upcoming difficulty levels and the type of affective feedback to be delivered. Surprisingly, results revealed that feedback was more effective when no emotional content was included, and lead to the conclusion that purely instructional and concise help messages are more important than the emotional reinforcement contained therein. This finding shows that this is still an open issue. Different settings present different constraints generating related compounding factors that affect obtained results. This research confirms that new approaches are required to determine when, how and where affect-driven feedback is needed. Affect-driven feedback, engagement and their mutual relation have been largely investigated. Student's interactions combined with their emotional state can be used to make personalised instructional decisions and/or modify the affect content within the feedback, aiming to entice engagement on the task. However, although it is generally assumed that providing encouraging feedback to the students should help them adopt a state of flow, there are instances where those encouraging messages might result counterproductive. In this paper, we analyze these issues in terms of a case study with 48 secondary school students using an Intelligent Tutoring System for arithmetical word problem solving. This system, which makes some common assumptions on how to relate affective state with performance, takes into account subjective (user's affective state) and objective (previous problem performance) information to decide the difficulty level of the next exercise and the type of affective feedback to be delivered. Surprisingly, findings revealed that feedback was more effective when no emotional content was included in the messages, and lead to the conclusion that purely instructional and concise help messages are more important than the emotional reinforcement contained therein. This finding, which coincides with related work, shows that this is still an open issue. Different settings present different constraints and there are related compounding factors that affect obtained results, such as the message's contents and their target, how to measure the effect of the message on engagement through affective variables considering other issues involved, and to what extent engagement can be manipulated solely in terms of affective feedback. The contribution here is that this research confirms that new approaches are needed to determine when, how and where affect-driven feedback is needed. In particular, based on our previous experience in developing educational recommender systems, we suggest the combination of user-centred design methodologies with data mining methods to yield a more effective feedback.     

Can instruction as such affect learning? The case of learner control

This study examined the role of learners’ perceptions in a learner-controlled computer-based learning environment. Computer-based learning environments that offer learner control (LC) to the learners are assumed to enhance motivation and learning outcomes. Recently, the focus of LC research has shifted from measuring the direct effect of LC on learning towards focusing on the underlying mechanisms of effective LC and determining under which conditions LC is most effective (Corbalan, Kester, & van Merriënboer, 2009). There is considerable agreement that learners’ skills, perceptions and the experienced cognitive load interactively affect LC as instructional strategy. For this study, 165 first-year university students participated in an on-line English learning course on verb conjugation. We investigated the effect of learners’ perceptions of LC by comparing the learning outcomes and motivation of learners that received additional instructions on learner control with a group of learners that did not receive additional instruction. Learner characteristics, such as prior knowledge, working memory capacity, self-efficacy and cognitive load, were taken into account. The results indicate that it is not instruction as such, but rather satisfaction with the degree of control that affects learning outcomes and motivation. We suggest that instruction as such does not suffice to enhance perception of control, and that learners’ perceptions play a mere role in the effectiveness of instructional strategies such as learner control.     

Relating research to curriculum and course development

One problem with research on how students learn (using new technology) is that it is usually concerned with a specific topic, i.e. it has rather a narrow domain and it is not clear to what extent the findings are applicable to other domains. This paper discusses research in two rather different domains: novices learning programming and school pupils interpreting cartesian graphs. We discuss the findings in each domain but our main focus is to examine the extent to which general principles and issues apply across both domains. Finally, we discuss some of the implications from our research, for instructional design.In the case of novices learning programming we are concerned with the development of instructional materials for teaching computer concepts. In the case of graph interpretation the research shows that interpreting trends in graphs is a complex skill which is often performed badly by pupils—but which teachers often assume they can do. Here we are concerned with how computers can be used to help pupils to develop graph interpretation skills and basic concepts.In order to gain a detailed understanding of the learning processes involved in both domains we are using Artificial Intelligence techniques to model the cognitive processes. We shall, therefore, also discuss how such techniques can help us improve instructional design.     

Exploring the determinants of IS developers’ behavioural intention to learn business skills

While previous research has emphasised the importance of business skills for information systems (IS) developers in the process of IS development, few studies have investigated the determinants of IS developers’ behavioural intention to learn business skills. The current study explores the factors affecting IS developers’ intention to learn business skills based on previous theories and research. Data collected from 258 valid respondents are tested against the research model using the partial least-squares approach. The results indicate that both job involvement and career insight have significant positive effects on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for learning business skills. Additionally, learning self-efficacy is not only found to have a significant influence on learning intention, but is also found to have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and learning intention. The findings of this study provide several important theoretical and practical implications for IS developers’ behaviour of learning business skills.     

Emotion recognition from speech: a review

Emotion recognition from speech has emerged as an important research area in the recent past. In this regard, review of existing work on emotional speech processing is useful for carrying out further research. In this paper, the recent literature on speech emotion recognition has been presented considering the issues related to emotional speech corpora, different types of speech features and models used for recognition of emotions from speech. Thirty two representative speech databases are reviewed in this work from point of view of their language, number of speakers, number of emotions, and purpose of collection. The issues related to emotional speech databases used in emotional speech recognition are also briefly discussed. Literature on different features used in the task of emotion recognition from speech is presented. The importance of choosing different classification models has been discussed along with the review. The important issues to be considered for further emotion recognition research in general and in specific to the Indian context have been highlighted where ever necessary.     

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.     

Risky business or sharing the load? - Social flow in collaborative mobile learning

Mobile learning has been built upon the premise that we can transform traditional classroom or computer-based learning activities into a more ubiquitous and connected form of learning. Tentative outcomes from this assertion have been witnessed in many collaborative learning activities, but few analytic observations on what triggers this collaboration have so far been made. However Social Flow, a concept framework that extends Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, may help us to partially explain the triggering mechanism of collaborative mobile learning. Our case study in this article, where learners together explore a built environment as part of a simulated security guard training programme, describes how the concept of social flow in a collaborative learning space might sketch out what triggers an optimal learning experience in collaboration and what can be additionally achieved in a collaborative learning experience. In this learning context, collaborative mobile learning might be seen to prompt more knowledge generation and extra learning tasks by fostering greater motivation than other learning environments.     

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.     

Developing classroom‐focused research in technology education

Abstract

During the last 10 years, curriculum documents in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, and New Zealand have emphasized the importance of students’ developing technological literacy. In utilizing research findings to consider future curriculum needs, there is the danger that the field may come to be understood in light of the research undertaken, not in light of what needs to be done. Past research has tended to focus on curriculum issues and the defining of the subject. If technology education is to advance as a curriculum area of worth and as a focus of research, then much more of our research effort must be on student and teacher learning in technology. This paper argues that classroom‐based research must become the focus of research over the next 10 years. While there is published research on what students do when involved in technological activities, we still lack significant research on students’ learning in technology and on ways in which this learning can be enhanced. Teacher and student conceptualization of technology is a complex issue and requires an understanding of the many factors that influence it. Classroom culture and student expectations appear to influence strongly the way in which students carry out their technological activities. Student learning in technology can be enhanced by effective formative interactions occurring between teacher and student and between student and student. Part of technology assessment should provide evidence of progression in learning, about which we currently know very little. This paper describes some fruitful areas of classroom‐based research that could inform technology curriculum development.     

Enhancing visual thinking and learning with computer graphics and virtual environment design

Prior to language development, all proto-human had was his senses and a significantly evolving brain [Bolles (1991) A Second Way of Knowing, Prentice Hall, New York]. Since we understand now how critically important language is to thinking, how could proto-human “think” in the absence of language as we know it? One answer is that proto-human depended upon visual learning as a primordial form of cognition, what we call today, “a second way of learning” with verbal learning presumably serving as the first learning system. The modern age has permitted visual learning to take a back-seat to verbal learning, however the capabilities of emerging digital visual technologies may help us recapture and extend our visual thinking and learning capabilities. This paper attempts to scratch the surface with regard to the visual thinking and learning potential afforded by the recent evolution in some computer graphics technologies. A general discussion of the scope and definition of visual thinking and learning is integrated with examples of both current research strategies and current and proposed teaching strategies. Our main focus has been on applications within a visually based art curriculum although computer graphics spans several discipline areas and, in most cases, includes some form of cooperative environment and development. Hence, it is hoped that the information contained here may have some useful applications to curriculum design in other discipline areas such as computer science, communication, mathematics and physics, just to name a few.