Teaching chemistry in everyday life contexts has been seen as one way to raise students’ interest in science and to educate scientific literate citizens. Teachers, however, often doubt that the actual content knowledge of the field is adequately acquired if it is taught in contexts that might distract the learner. In order to guarantee enough emphasis to be given to the underlying concepts and ...

Inspectable (open) learner models have been in use for some time now. This poster presents views of the learner model that have become more common, such as skill meters and concept maps; and introduces developments in novel interfaces for open learner models including the use of animation, audio and haptic feedback, and user-constructed learner model views.

The following experiment investigated effects of lowand high-coherent prior-knowledge activation using concept maps. Thereby, we refer to and extend coherence-effects from text comprehension (McNamara & Kintsch, 1996) to priorknowledge activation. Low-coherent prior-knowledge activation was operationalized by conditions of creating-andlabeling-lines between provided concepts, high-coherent prio...

Concept maps have become a widely used educational tool around the globe. The advancements in computerized interface technologies have enabled even more alternatives for using concept maps in teaching and learning. This study investigates the effects of two different touch technology-based concept mapping interaction modes on students' learning achievements and learning attitudes in a natural s...

Learning with self-explaining examples is an effective method in well-structured domains. We analyzed this method in teaching the complex skill of argumentation. In an experiment we compared three conditions (n = 47 students of educational sciences) that differed with respect to whether and how the processing of the examples was supported by different help functions. The analysis of the video-b...

In this study, we introduce a method to analyze the effectiveness of the interactive information access system based on the changes in users’ knowledge structure. We use concept maps to compare each user’s knowledge structure before and after a search. We discuss the difference between proposed evaluation method and questionnaires by using the results of user experiments for an interactive news...

This paper presents a scheme for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of concept maps in the context of a web-based adaptive concept map assessment tool, referred to as COMPASS. The propositions are characterized qualitatively based on specific criteria and on the error(s) that may be identified. The quantitative assessment depends on the weights assigned to the concepts/propositions and...

A new problem-based course in molecular biology, genetics, and cancer for first-year veterinary students was developed at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University (New York). The course was developed out of a desire to foster student-centered and lifelong learning and to integrate basic and clinical science knowledge despite a lack of established hierarchies or authoritative tex...

In this paper, we have discussed the design of CoMPASS and the theoretical foundations that it is based on. CoMPASS is a hypertext system that presents students with external, graphical representations in the form of concept maps as well as textual representations both of which change dynamically as students traverse through the domain and make navigational decisions. In a study in which middle...

The study adds to the body of knowledge about different types of feedback. Feedback is considered a fundamental component for supporting and regulating learning processes. Especially in computer-based and self-regulated learning environments, the nature of feedback is of critical importance. Hence, this study investigates different types of automatically generated feedback. Seventy-four student...