Cognitive disequilibrium and its affiliated affective state of confusion have been found to positively correlate with learning, presumably due to the effortful cognitive activities that accompany their experience. Although confusion naturally occurs in several learning contexts, we hypothesize that it can be induced and scaffolded to increase learning opportunities. We addressed the possibility...

Not all learning takes place in an educational setting: more and more self-motivated learners are turning to on-line text to learn about new topics. Our goal is to provide such learners with the well-known benefits of testing by automatically generating quiz questions for online text. Prior work on question generation has focused on the grammaticality of generated questions and generating effec...

While evaluating bedside teaching by attending physicians on the Mayo Clinic's general internal medicine hospital services, the author learned that peer review enhances an understanding of teaching for both observers and subjects of peer review. In this article the author offers five insights derived from his and two colleagues' observations of bedside teaching during a six-month period in 2002...

OBJECTIVE To develop a game-based review instrument for use by newborn caregivers in preparing for emergency situations. DESIGN One hundred and one test questions covering pathophysiology, resuscitation, and medications were developed. The questions then underwent expert and peer review, psychometric testing for content validity and test-retest reliability, and a game trial. ANALYSIS The ne...

Information overload is a well-known problem which can be particularly detrimental to learners. In this paper, we propose a method to support learners in the information seeking process which consists in answering their questions by retrieving question paraphrases and their corresponding answers from social Q&A sites. Given the novelty of this kind of data, it is crucial to get a better underst...

This paper examines the dynamics of college students’ selfregulatory processes within self-regulated learning (SRL) and externallyregulated learning (ERL) episodes during hypermedia learning. We re-analyzed and extended the results from an original study recently conducted by Azevedo and colleagues [1] to address four questions related to adaptivity, based on the temporal and dynamic deployment...

Research on inspectable learner models involves the study of representational aspects of the profile that systems maintain about learners. When learners and teachers interact with inspectable learner models several questions arise, such as: What kind of representation is most appropriate for learners and teachers?; How will students and teachers react to different representations?; How should l...

We study the impact of question difficulty on learners’ engagement and learning using an experiment with an open online educational system for adaptive practice of geography. The experiment shows that easy questions are better for short term engagement, whereas difficult questions are better for long term engagement and learning. These results stress the necessity of careful formalization of go...

many textbooks include semantically related words and sometimes teachers add synonyms, antonyms, etc. to the words in order to present new vocabulary items without questioning the possible effects. this study sought to investigate the effect of teaching vocabulary through synonym, semantically unrelated, and hyponym sets based on higa’s (1963) proposed continuum. a total of 120 iranian intermed...