Learning State Research Articles

Research on humanised web-based learning model

Web technology has provided numerous significant educational opportunities and web-based education services have spread throughout the world. However, the web has brought debates as well as opportunities. According to the constructivism educational theory, the external learning environment and learner's mentality must be regarded in a web-based learning model. Students' psychology sub-model is used to describe the learner's mental states and the transformations among them. Two categories of mentality (positive and negative), subdivided further into five classes, are proposed. Collaborative learning sub-model is used to describe the interactions between the learner and the learning environment, which includes tutor agents, other learners and basic knowledge resource.

A web-based e-learning system for increasing study efficiency by stimulating learner’s motivation

Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, more and more people are taking advantage of distance learning courses and during the last few years enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of distance learning systems. So far, many e-learning systems are proposed and used practically. However, in these systems the e-learning completion rate is about 30%. One of the reasons is the low study desire when the learner studies the learning materials. In this research, we propose an interactive Web-based e-learning system. The purpose of our system is to increase the e-learning completion rate by stimulating learner's motivation. The proposed system has three subsystems: the learning subsystem, learner support subsystem, and teacher support subsystem. The learning subsystem improves the learner's study desire. The learner support subsystem supports the learner during the study, and the teacher support subsystem supports the teacher to get the learner's study state. To evaluate the proposed system, we developed several experiments and surveys. By using new features such as: display of learner's study history, change of interface color, encourage function, ranking function, self-determination of the study materials, and grouping of learners, the proposed system can increase the learning efficiency.

The Art of Bridge Building: Providing for Gifted Children

If your advocacy efforts are in need of revitalization and direction, this case study is required reading. The state organization that is ready to truly make a difference in the way children are educated can take lessons from the initiatives and accomplishments recorded here. Understanding the dedication and detail necessary, reaping the benefits of this state's learning curve, and borrowing the strategies found to be successful will help your own organization's efforts. The analogy of bridge building makes concrete the less-tangible phases of getting a mandate for gifted education. This case study gives the blueprints for preparing those who will construct the mandate. Phase 1 entails educating all about the legislative process, building relationships and affiliate groups, getting technical help, and setting goals and making commitments. Phase 2 encompasses gaining recognition, keeping up the commitment, and learning how to compromise. Phase 3 follows a victory by publicizing the benefits, saying thanks, and developing the regulations. And Phase 4 looks to the future by maintaining relationships and designing a new vision. There are important lessons and a wealth of ideas in this state's story.

A Validation Study of the Performance Indicators and Learner Outcomes of Kentucky's Alternate Assessment for Students with Significant Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to conduct an expert validation of Kentucky's alternate assessment for students with significant disabilities. Since 1992, this has been the only fully operational, statewide alternate assessment system in the nation. A total of 44 national authorities in best practices for students with moderate and severe cognitive disabilities responded to this validation. This study revealed a high degree of professional congruence on the core of best practices embodied in the performance criteria for Kentucky's alternate assessment. However, respondents raised concerns about the extent to which more limited learner outcomes had been identified for students with significant disabilities, and whether the alternate assessment was sufficiently aligned to the general curricular expectations for all students. Finally, we present considerations for other states and local school districts in the design of alternate assessments, as well as the specific revisions in content and scoring standards Kentucky has made to more clearly address the relationship of its alternate assessment to the state's learning outcomes for all students.

Middle-Grades Geometry Activities

Several years ago, when illinois issued its manuals describing the state's learning objectives in mathematics, one school district spent several months examining the mathematics curriculum from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. District goals were written by a committee, condensed to state goals, and submitted to the state as a learning-assessment plan. In the process, deficiencies in the district's curriculum were uncovered. A main deficiency concerned the amount and type of geometry taught in the middle grades.

Gradual development of L2 phrase structure

We begin by reviewing data from Korean, Turkish, Italian and Spanish-speaking adults acquiring German without formal instruction. Our findings have shown that these learners transfer their L1 VPs: the Korean and Turkish speakers transfer a head-final VP and the Italian and Spanish speakers first transfer a head-initial VP and then switch its headedness to the correct, head-final value for German. Although functional projections in Korean and Turkish are head-final and in Italian and Spanish head-initial, all four groups of learners subsequently posit head-initial functional projections in German (which are not always target-like). We conclude that only lexical projections constitute the L2 learner's initial state; the development of functional projections is driven solely by the interaction of X'-Theory with the target-language input. We then discuss some studies on the acquisition of French by English speakers and of English by speakers of various L1s which purport to bring evidence to bear against our approach. Upon closer examination, the evidence turns out to offer further support for the position that the sole projections which the learner transfers from the L1 are lexical ones. Finally, we account for potentially problematic verb-raising data from French learners of English. Rather than taking the stance that French raising to Agr is transferred, we propose that L2 learners' identification of free morphemes as salient triggers leads to a misanalysis of verb raising in English. We also apply this idea to a reanalysis of the morpheme-order studies of the 1970s.

Intelligent educational systems: identifying and decoupling the conversational levels

Intelligent educational systems (IESs) have traditionally been thought of in terms of their functional subsystems. The three obligatory subsystems are those containing domain knowledge, a model of the learner's current state, and teaching knowledge. We argue that it is useful to reconceptualise IESs: we should think of them from the point of view of the multiple levels of conversational interaction that they support with a learner. We suggest that in many cases it is useful to identify a task level at which the learner is working, and a higher discussion level at which the learner and system converse about, and reflect on the primary task. If the two levels can be to some extent decoupled, meaning that each level has less than complete knowledge of the other level, IES development might be simplified. In some cases an IES might be built by the addition of a discussion level component to an existing computer tool, simulation, game or microworld. A critical requirement for a decoupled IES is a representation for communication between levels; study of human tutoring is needed to guide identification of suitable representations.

StrathTutor ©: The development and evaluation of a learning-by-browsing system on the Macintosh

An account is given of the major influences on the design of StrathTutor, a leaming-by-browsing tutorial system for the Apple Macintosh computer. In CAL programming, explicit links between frames in a tutorial represent a limiting and expensive approach to authoring and Al techniques are widely expected to point the way to future progress. Intelligent CAL appears to be concentrating on problems thought to be amenable to the expert system approach, i.e. highly procedural and well analysed tasks. Developments in technology are tending to force the pace. Interactive laser-discs and CD-ROM's allow fast random access to extensive graphic and textual data. Learning will come to include interaction with complex data structures by means of browsing, scanning, wandering and exploring. Navigation through the data, and ease of authoring, will require more sophisticated forms of knowledge representation than indexation, including semantic networks, production rules and error libraries. Ultimately, the issue of learner control will require to be confronted, basically because the best possible model of the learner's state of knowledge is that residing in the learner. In StrathTutor, knowledge is represented by attribute coding of each frame, influenced by theoretical work from two apparently unrelated areas: the computational model of human memory MINERVA 2 and expert systems based on pattern recognition. Information in the form of frame contents and as attributes is separate from the tutorial shell which conducts the interaction with the learner, with the aid of the Macintosh user interface. STmaker operates in “authoring” mode allowing the composing of new tutorials, and STviewer replays a trace of a student's path through a tutorial. The menu choices in StrathTutor are described. Evaluation of a system such as Strath Tutor is being attempted in three ways: comparison of effectiveness of learning with traditional forms of instruction, cognitive analysis while the student learns, and formal and informal assessments in the hands of both teachers and students. Groups using Strath Tutor have shown significant learning. The inherent difficulties encountered have led to better modes of experimentation being devised, and to suggested modification of Strath Tutor itself.

Sequential item selection: Optimal and heuristic policies

This paper considers testing in which the goal is to minimize the number of test items required to establish a learner's state of ability. Focus is on optimal or near optimal selection over a well-defined universe of items or stimuli. Selection policies are determined for the case in which the items have hierarchical or partial hierarchical relationships. Derivation of an optimal policy rests upon techniques from dynamic programming. For situations in which an optimal policy may be too costly to compute, two heuristic approximations are offered. One heuristic counts the hypothetical estimates of ability that remain tenable following a response to each item and chooses the item that minimizes the expectation of that number. The other selects the item that maximizes the statistic of information.

Determination of Learning Sequences: A New Approach to Learning Diagnosis and Treatment

A new method is presented to determine how well a learner has achieved a given set of learning objectives and in what areas he is still deficient. This method permits rigorous and practical quantitative analysis of instructional data. The new method is based on the use of a hierarchy of learning objectives. Thus, it provides information on both the learner's present state (diagnosis) and the indicated subsequent learning sequence (treatment). The method is also applicable to course design and instructional program evaluations.

Retrieval failures in alcohol state-dependent learning

Retrieval processes subject to disruption by alteration of drug conditions were studied in a state-dependent learning experiment. On the first day of the 2-day experiment, 28 human subjects performed four verbal learning tasks in either an alcohol state (1.0 ml/kg) or a sober state, and the next day they attempted to recall the material in either the same or in an altered condition. Two of the tasks involved recall cues or prompts, and the other two required the subjects to recall the material unaided. Results indicated state-dependency on the two tasks that did not involve recall cues and no state-dependency on the two tasks involving cues. This finding indicates that memory failures resulting from a changed drug state can be reversed by appropriate experimental cueing or prompting, and implies that a learner's drug state has stimulus properties for recall. The role of drugs in contributing to a person's cognitive context and the resultant effects on memory are discussed.