Towards Effective Combination of Prior Knowledge and Cognitive Styles in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Learning Systems (AEHS) have been developed and evaluated over the past decade. These AEHS tailored navigational support and presentation of content basing on either prior knowledge or cognitive styles of students separately. The empirical evaluations of the AEHS showed that, generally, there is positive improvement in the performance and perceptions of students. There is, however, a need to explore how prior knowledge and cognitive styles could be strategically combined in AEHS in order to maximize learning and comprehension of educational materials. To this end, this paper pursues this exploration by presenting results of a comparative analysis between two AEHS, one tailored to students’ prior knowledge while the other to their cognitive styles, with emphasis on Pask’s Holist-Serialist dimension. The comparative measure for this investigation is improvement in learning performance. A total of 104 students participated in the study, with 60 students using the prior knowledge version while 44 participated on the cognitive styles version. The findings indicated that the participants using the prior knowledge version outperformed those using the cognitive styles version basing on post-hoc tests. The implication of these results for the design of effective AEHS and recommendations are discussed by this paper.