An Adaptive Hypermedia System Integrating Thinking Style (AHS-TS): Model and Experiment

This paper presents an approach to integrate thinking styles into adaptive hypermedia system. The main objective was to develop an adaptive system and assess the effect of adapting pedagogical activities individualized to the student’s thinking style. The proposed approach used adaptive hypermedia technology to improve learning process by adapting course content presentation to student thinking styles. The design of adaptive hypermedia is based on quantitative and qualitative research. The adaptation rules are deduced from the results of a psychological questionnaire. Pedagogical activities are the outcome of a series of inferences; the final activity sets are manifested in adaptive hypermedia system. Stereotype user model is used to cluster all possible users into groups, providing mapping from a specific combination of user features to one of the stereotypes. Our approach is inspired by HBDI® model, focusing on the perspective of learner, meeting the needs of an adaptive hypermedia system.