The learning benefits of using eye trackers to enhance the geospatial abilities of elementary school students

In this study, we examined the spatial abilities of students using eye‐movement tracking devices to identify and analyze their characteristics. For this research, 12 students aged 11–12 years participated as novices and 4 mathematics students participated as experts. A comparison of the visual‐spatial abilities of each group showed key factors of superior spatial ability, and a spatial ability instructional strategy was developed. After training, the same spatial ability test was conducted again, and eye‐tracking records were used to compare the participants' line‐of‐sight and answer rate results with those of the previous test. Specific references and recommendations are provided for spatial ability training education and assessment.     

The role of community feedback in the student example authoring process: An evaluation of AnnotEx

This paper explores a new approach to engage students in authoring educational content. This approach was implemented in AnnotEx (Example Annotator) system, which allows students to annotate computer programming examples with line‐by‐line explanations and review annotations produced by ther peers. A controlled study of AnnotEx presented in this paper evaluated the impact of the community peer‐reviewing process on the quality of produced annotations and student learning. The study confirmed that community feedback increases the volume and the quality of produced annotations and positively affects the work of weaker students. The peer‐rating process enabled the community to distinguish good and bad annotations. Peer comments provided efficient guidelines for improving annotations and caused a significant increase in quality.     

Understanding the behavioral intention to play Austronesian learning games: from the perspectives of learning outcome,service quality,and hedonic value

Although ubiquitous learning is a novel and creative teaching approach, two key issues inhibit its success overall: a lack of appropriate learning strategies regarding learning objectives, and ineffective learning tools for receiving knowledge regarding the chosen subjects. To address these issues, we develops and designs a game-based educational app and an object-linked knowledge environment in order to help learners learn about Taiwan’s Austronesian culture. 70 fifth-grade students are split into experimental and control groups to determine whether there are significant learning differences. For the experimental group, we use a questionnaire survey to assess students’ learning condition and to measure their willingness to continue to use this app. The questionnaire examines mobile learning from the perspectives of service quality, hedonic value,and certain control variables. Service quality reliability is found to be the key factor driving learners’ willingness to use the system. The perception of hedonic value also has significant influence on learners’ willingness. The control variable of subjective norm is found to be beneficial in encouraging learners to use the system, thus affecting and increasing learners’ willingness. We conclude that in an outdoor object-linked knowledge environment, students learn more effectively when the activities involve the use of an educational app.     

Fostering radical conceptual change through dual‐situated learning model

This article examines how the Dual‐Situated Learning Model (DSLM) facilitates a radical change of concepts that involve the understanding of matter, process, and hierarchical attributes. The DSLM requires knowledge of students' prior beliefs of science concepts and the nature of these concepts. In addition, DSLM also serves two functions: it creates dissonance with students' prior knowledge by challenging their epistemological and ontological beliefs about science concepts, and it provides essential mental sets for students to reconstruct a more scientific view of the concepts. In this study, the concept “heat transfer: heat conduction and convection,” which requires an understanding of matter, process, and hierarchical attributes, was chosen to examine how DSLM can facilitate radical conceptual change among students. Results show that DSLM has great potential to foster a radical conceptual change process in learning heat transfer. Radical conceptual change can definitely be achieved and does not necessarily involve a slow or gradual process. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 142–164, 2004     

Cinema and history: critical reflections

Abstract

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien was invited to Singapore to talk about himself. In the speech, he focused on talking about his family background, his childhood memories, life experiences and how these experiences affected his life, and also how he made his films. Furthermore, as Taiwan had gone through many drastic political and economic changes, especially after the lifting of Martial Law, these conditions influenced Hou’s life and his films, too. That is, Hou’s films presented not only the changes in a rapidly urbanizing rural society, but also the important events of Taiwan’s history. At the end of the speech, Hou also mentioned that realizing the importance of social responsibilities, he would like to get more involved in the public sphere in order to make a difference in society.     

Multilingual document mining and navigation using self-organizing maps

One major approach for information finding in the WWW is to navigate through some Web directories and browse them until the goal pages were found. However, such directories are generally constructed manually and may have disadvantages of narrow coverage and inconsistency. Besides, most of existing directories provide only monolingual hierarchies that organized Web pages in terms that a user may not be familiar with. In this work, we will propose an approach that could automatically arrange multilingual Web pages into a multilingual Web directory to break the language barriers in Web navigation. In this approach, a self-organizing map is constructed to train each set of monolingual Web pages and obtain two feature maps, which reveal the relationships among Web pages and thematic keywords, respectively, for such language. We then apply a hierarchy generation process on these maps to obtain the monolingual hierarchy for these Web pages. A hierarchy alignment method is then applied on these monolingual hierarchies to discover the associations between nodes in different hierarchies. Finally, a multilingual Web directory is constructed according to such associations. We applied the proposed approach on a set of Web pages and obtained interesting result that demonstrates the feasibility of our method in multilingual Web navigation.     

“iRobiQ”: the influence of bidirectional interaction on kindergarteners’ reading motivation,literacy, and behavior

This study focused on an intelligent robot which was viewed as a language teaching/learning tool to improve children’s reading ability, reading interest, and learning behavior. The iRobiQ, with its multimedia contents, was employed to encourage children to read, speak, and answer questions. Fifty-seven pre-kindergarteners participated in this study, and they were divided into an experimental group (30 children using iRobiQ) and a control group (27 children using a tablet-PC). After 2 months of experiments, the reading ability of the experimental group was better than that of the control group. It was found that using iRobiQ as a learning tool had many advantages, for example, the enhancement of learners’ reading literacy, in comparison with the use of tablet-PC. In this study, there were three interesting findings: (1) iRobiQ is a more effective learning companion as compared to tablet-PC; (2) iRobiQ is a bidirectional interactive toy; and (3) iRobiQ can foster and promote the peer collaboration and competition because it has intriguing characteristics, particularly its communicative and interactive functions. The bidirectional interactive robots allow pre-kindergarten teachers to create more active and interactive learning environment for children and provide the children with more various learning contents.     

The impact of SSCI and SCI on Taiwan’s academy: an outcry for fair play

The increasing importance of the competition in global university ranking has resulted in a paradigm shift in academic governance in East Asia. Many governments have introduced different strategies for benchmarking their leading universities to facilitate global competitiveness and international visibility. A major trend in the changing university governance is the emergence of a regulatory evaluation scheme for faculty research productivity, reflected by the striking features of the recent changing academic profile of publication norms and forms that go beyond the territories of nation-states in the East and West. With the expansion of the Taiwanese higher education system in the last two decades, the maintenance of quality to meet the requirements for international competitiveness has become a key concern for policy makers. Since 2005, the Ministry of Education has introduced a series of university governance policies to enhance academic excellence in universities and established a formal university evaluation policy to improve the competitiveness and international visibility of Taiwanese universities. In so doing, the government has legalized a clear link between evaluation results and public funding allocation. Research performance is assessed in terms of the number of articles published in journals indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI), the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and in terms of citation rates and associated factors. Therefore, evaluation has taken on a highly quantitative dimension. Despite the efforts of concerned parties to encourage academic excellence, the abovementioned quantitative evaluation indicators have resulted in bitter complaints from the humanities and social sciences, whose research accomplishments are devalued and ignored by the current quantitative indicators. In this paper, the authors describe the recent petition for collective action initiated by university faculty to protest the privileging of SSCI and SCI publications as critical indicators for academic performance regardless of faculty discipline and specialization. The article concludes its argument with a group petition calling for more diverse and reliable indicators in recognizing the research of different natures and disciplines while creating culturally responsive evaluation criteria for social sciences and humanities in the Taiwanese academe. The article not only sheds light on academic evaluation literature, especially on the uncertain paradox of globalization and market economy, but also proposes alternatives to the evaluation system for humanities and social sciences in higher education.     

Leadership of vocational high school principals in curriculum reform: A case study in Taiwan

This research attempts to comprehend the traits and behaviors of vocational high school principals in implementing curriculum reform. In-depth interviews with experienced principals of three vocational high schools sought to identify the leadership roles and tasks that led to successful curriculum reform for vocational high school programs.