Promoting discussion in peer instruction: Discussion partner assignment and accountability scoring mechanisms

Peer instruction (PI) involves students answering questions and peer discussion learning activities. PI can enhance student performance and engagement in classroom instruction. However, some students do not engage in the discussions. This study proposes two mechanisms, discussion partner assignment and accountability scoring mechanisms, to form positive interdependence among students and individual accountability for each student to promote student discussions in PI. The evaluation results show that the student discussion rate with the promoting mechanisms is significantly higher than the rate without the mechanisms. The results from the questionnaire reveal that the mechanisms form positive interdependence and individual accountability to promote students to engage in the discussions.     

Coefficient relationship between rook and chromatic polynomials

It is shown that a p+q node graph G_c representation can be drawn for a chessboard C(p,q) i.e. an array of p rows and q columns. It is shown further that the coefficients of the rook polynomial for C(p,q) correspond 1:1 inversely with the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial for G_c written in factorial form.     

The Influences of Aesthetic Life Experience and Expertise on Aesthetic Judgement and Emotion in Mundane Arts

Aesthetics has been regarded as a fundamental personal value. Most of the previous studies regarding aesthetic experience (AE) have focused on fine arts, rather than the everyday arts that are closely related to our everyday life. This study analysed the relationships among aesthetic life experience, expertise and different types of AE outcomes (aesthetic judgement and emotion) inspired by everyday designed products. The participants in this study were 115 college students, and an E‐prime program that included 120 pictures of designed products were employed to measure aesthetic judgement (beautiful, ordinary, or ugly) and aesthetic emotion (fearful, disgusting, neutral, or pleasure). The results revealed three major phenomena. (1) Two major types of AE outcomes are perceiving beauty with positive emotion and perceiving ugliness with negative emotion. (2) Although there are similar patterns for how aesthetic life experience and expertise influence personal tastes regarding beauty and aesthetic emotion, abundant expertise in designed products contributes more in differentiating emotion when viewing the beautiful designed products. (3) The consensus of the evaluation of ugliness is stronger than when evaluating beauty. In addition, a model of AE with regard to everyday designed products was proposed. The findings of this study shed light on the cultivation of aesthetic abilities and product design that could be utilised in education.     

Exploring Secondary Science Teachers' Perceptions on the Goals of Earth Science Education in Taiwan

The educational reform movement since the 1990s has led the secondary earth science curriculum in Taiwan into a stage of reshaping. The present study investigated secondary earth science teachers' perceptions on the Goals of Earth Science Education (GESE). The GESE should express the statements of philosophy and purpose toward which educators direct their attention, and provide the visions or broad aims that earth science education is designed to achieve. Based on this rationale, the purpose of this study was to explore teachers' perceptions on the GESE at secondary school level (Grades 7–12) in Taiwan. A national survey of 1,000 earth science teachers was conducted in May 2004, with a response rate of 70.2%. The results revealed that ‘Students acquire basic earth science concepts’ is the most important GESE both in teachers' preferred goal and their actual teaching practice in the secondary earth science education; that there is a major gap between teachers' preferred and actual GESE in terms of ‘Preparing students for the entrance examinations’; and that the differences between teachers' preferred and actual GESE are contingent on the teachers' age, the school size, and the teacher education background of teachers.     

Effects of the inquiry-based mobile learning model on the cognitive load and learning achievement of students

The advancement of mobile device and wireless communication technologies is having a great influence on the design concept of learning activities. In this study, we attempt to integrate field study into the inquiry-based mobile learning model; moreover, a mobile learning environment that allows students to access both physical and virtual resources is developed accordingly. During the in-field learning activity, the mobile learning system is able to present the learning tasks, guide the students to visit the real-world learning targets for exploration, and provide them with supplementary materials via the mobile devices. The aim of this research focuses on the effects of this mobile learning model on students' cognitive load and learning achievements. The 51 sixth graders who participated in this research were assigned to an experimental and a control group. From the pre and posttests as well as the cognitive load questionnaire, it was found that the students who learned with the inquiry-based mobile learning approach had better learning achievement and less cognitive load than those who learned with the traditional approach. Therefore, it is concluded that the mobile learning model has positive effects on elementary students in local culture learning.     

An innovative concept map approach for improving students' learning performance with an instant feedback mechanism

Concept maps have been widely employed for helping students organise their knowledge as well as evaluating their knowledge structures in a wide range of subject matters. Although researchers have recognised concept maps as being an important educational tool, past experiences have also revealed the difficulty of evaluating the correctness of a concept map. It usually takes days or weeks for teachers to manually evaluate the concept maps developed by students; consequently, the students cannot receive timely feedback from the teachers, which not only affects their learning schedules, but also significantly influences the students' learning achievements. In this paper, a computer‐based concept map‐oriented learning strategy with real‐time assessment and feedback is proposed in order to cope with the problems mentioned above. Our approach provides immediate evaluation of concept maps and gives also real‐time feedback to the students. An experiment has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this new strategy in comparison with the conventional computer‐based concept map approach. It is found that our innovative approach can be significantly beneficial to promote learning achievements as well as the learning attitudes of students.     

Substitutive competition: Virtual pets as competitive buffers to alleviate possible negative influence on pupils

Although competition is regarded as a powerful motivator in game‐based learning, it might have a negative influence, such as damage to confidence, on students who lose the competition. In this paper, we propose an indirect approach, substitutive competition, to alleviate such negative influences. The approach is used to develop a My‐Pet v3 system, in which pupils master subject materials to make their pets stronger, and compete against each other. Specifically, pupils learn Chinese idioms in a pet‐training game scenario, and their mastery of the material is related to the pets' strength to win the competition. The result of the competition is influenced by whether pupils spend enough effort on the learning tasks. This intention is expected to alleviate the negative influence that results from direct competition. A within‐subject experiment was conducted to examine the influence of substitutive competition. The results indicated that substitutive competition seems a promising scheme to maximise the power of competition. However, there were no apparent evidences in this study to demonstrate its effect to alleviate pupils' sense of failure, as compared with other two direct competition conditions.     

Reading with robot and human companions in library literacy activities: A comparison study

Motivated by mixed evidence on the effectiveness of reading companions on children’s reading performance, as well as the clear and present need for libraries to conduct literacy education, this study sought to investigate the feasibility of using social robots in library literacy activities and to extract the essential functions of effective reading companions by comparing human and robot co-readers. A humanoid robot, Robot Julia, was developed as a social robot to provide oral conversation and offer children tactful and stimulating support for their reading. An experimental study was conducted to examine child patrons’ perceptions and performance in reading activities with the robot companion as compared to human companions. A total of 36 elementary school children participated in the study. The results positively supported that the participants perceived the robot companion as more favourable and desirable to read with than a human co-reader. The children favoured robotic verbalisation over human verbalisation. According to the results of the comparison, cognitively it was found that human and robot companions facilitated children’s reading comprehension in different ways and that the children performed similarly well with both kinds of reading companions. Affectively, the robot co-reader induced more social interaction during the reading sessions. Despite all the positive aspects, it is also necessary to consider the limitations including the novelty effect of the approach. This study contributes empirical evidence in the pragmatic field of library science and expands upon social robot research by exploring one-on-one child–robot interactions in reading, as opposed to the group contexts in previous studies.