Developing multi-dimensional evaluation criteria for English learning websites with university students and professors

Many English learning websites have been developed worldwide, but little research has been conducted concerning the development of comprehensive evaluation criteria. The main purpose of this study is thus to construct a multi-dimensional set of criteria to help learners and teachers evaluate the quality of English learning websites. These evaluation guidelines are based on web usability, learning materials, functionality of assisting language learning, technology integration, and learner preferences. In order to achieve this goal, the researchers used a rigorous four-phase procedure and utilized both qualitative and quantitative research methods with university students and professors in Design-based Research to construct and refine the evaluation criteria in 2008–2009. Fifty-eight evaluation criteria were refined and finalized. In addition, to cope with the difficulties in applying the derived criteria and explaining what the results indicate, this study presents a practical application by evaluating an English learning website.     

An expert system for improving web-based problem-solving ability of students

Although previous research has demonstrated the benefits of applying the Internet facilities to the learning process, difficulty in using this strategy has also been identified. One of the major difficulties is owing to the lack of an online instructional environment that can advise the students in using the Internet facilities to solve problems. In this paper, an innovative approach is proposed, and it develops the knowledge base of an expert system by analyzing the online problem-solving behaviors of the teachers. Consequently, the expert system works as an instructor to assist the students in improving their web-based problem-solving ability. To demonstrate the innovative approach, two experts are asked to evaluate the performance of the expert system. Experimental results show that, the novel approach is able to provide accurate and constructive suggestions to students in improving their problem-solving ability.     

Effects of teaching and learning styles on students’ reflection levels for ubiquitous learning

Ubiquitous learning (u-learning), in conjunction with supports from the digital world, is recognized as an effective approach for situating students in real-world learning environments. Earlier studies concerning u-learning have mainly focused on investigating the learning attitudes and learning achievements of students, while the causations such as learning style and teaching style were usually ignored. This study aims to investigate the effects of teaching styles and learning styles on reflection levels of students within the context of u-learning. In particular, we investigated the teaching styles at the dimensions of brainstorming and instruction and recall and the learning styles at the dimensions of active and reflective learning. The experiment was conducted with 39 fifth grader students at an elementary school in southern Taiwan. A u-learning environment was established at a butterfly ecology garden to conduct experiments for natural science courses. The experimental results of one-way ANCOVA show that those students who received a matching teaching–learning style presented a significant improvement in their reflection level. That is, matching the learning styles of students with the appropriate teaching styles can significantly improve students’ reflection levels in a u-learning environment.     

A two-tier test approach to developing location-aware mobile learning systems for natural science courses

The advancement of wireless and mobile technologies has enabled students to learn in an environment that combines learning resources from both the real world and the digital world. Although such an approach has been recognized as being innovative and important, several problems have been revealed in practical learning activities. One major problem is owing to the lack of proper learning strategies or tools for assisting the students to acquire knowledge in such a complex learning scenario. Students might feel excited or engaged when using the mobile devices to learn in the real context; nevertheless, their learning achievements could be disappointing. To deal with this problem, this study presents a mobile learning system that employs Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to detect and examine real-world learning behaviors of students. This study also utilizes each student’s responses from a two-tier test (i.e., multiple-choice questions in a two-level format) to provide personalized learning guidance (called two-tier test guiding, T³G). The experimental results from a natural science course of an elementary school show that this innovative approach is able to improve the learning achievements of students as well as enhance their learning motivation.     

Knowledge acquisition for fuzzy expert systems

Expert systems have been successfully applied to a wide variety of application domains. to achieve better performance, researchers have tried to employ fuzzy logic to the development of expert systems. However, as fuzzy rules and membership functions are difficult to define, most of the existing tools and environments for expert systems do not support fuzzy representation and reasoning. Thus, it is time-consuming to develop fuzzy expert systems. In this article we propose a new approach to elicit expertise and to generate knowledge bases for fuzzy expert systems. A knowledge acquisition system based upon the approach is also presented, which can help knowledge engineers to create, adjust, debug, and execute fuzzy expert systems. Some control techniques are employed in the knowledge acquisition system so that the concepts of fuzzy logic could be directly applied to conventional expert system shells; moreover, a graphic user interface is provided to facilitate the adjustment of membership functions and the display of outputs. the knowledge acquisition system has been integrated with a popular expert system shell, CLIPS, to offer a complete development environment for knowledge engineers. With the help of this environment, the development of fuzzy expert systems becomes much more convenient and efficient. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Developing a context-aware ubiquitous learning system based on a hyper-heuristic approach by taking real-world constraints into account

In a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment, learning systems are aware of students’ locations and learning status in the real world via the use of sensing technologies which provide personalized guidance or support. In such a learning environment that guides students to observe and learn from real-world targets, various physical world constraints need to be taken into account when planning learning paths for individuals. In this study, an optimization problem is formulated by taking the relevance of real-world learning targets and the environmental constraints into account when determining personalized learning paths in the real world to maximize students’ learning efficacy. Moreover, a hyper-heuristic approach is proposed to efficiently find quality learning paths for individual students. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, the teachers’ feedback was collected and analyzed based on the learning activities conducted in an elementary school natural science course; in addition, the performances of the proposed algorithm and other approaches were compared based on a set of test data.     

Interaction of visual interface and academic levels with young students’ anxiety,playfulness, and enjoyment in programming for robot control

Universal Access in the Information Society - Young students’ engagement in computer programming has been recognized as a crucial issue in educational settings nowadays. In this study, a...