Adaptation with Four Dimensional Personalization Criteria Based on Felder Silverman Model

Abstract

In the past decades, various systems have been proposed to provide students with a better learning environment by taking personal factors into account. Learning styles have been one of the widely adopted factors in the previous studies as a reference for adapting learning content or organizing the content. However, very few researchers give an idea of matching e-media with appropriate teaching and learning styles and very few studies give an idea of which appropriate combinations of electronic media and learning styles are more effective than other. In this paper, the authors aim to prototype an AFDPC-FS system (Adaptation with Four Dimensional Personalization Criteria based on Felder Silverman model). Their system presents a general framework for combining and adapting teaching strategies, learning styles and electronic media according to Felder-Silverman's learning style model. An experiment was designed to explore the effect of adaptation to different learning styles when learning materials were matched with learning styles. In particular it was set up to see whether there are significant differences in learning achievement and cognitive load between two groups, an experimental group who studied with learning style-fit version and a control group who studied with non-fit version of the system without adaptation to learning styles. The experimental results showed that the proposed system could improve the learning achievements of the students. Moreover, it was found that the students' cognitive load was significantly decreased.