Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Instructional systems--Design.
- Creators: Atkinson, Robert
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Description
This quantitative, quasi-experimental study examined the effectiveness of three types of online guided-practice activities designed to increase learning of visual art concepts, the color concepts of hue, tint, shade, value, and neutral colors in particular, among fifth grade students in a large school district in the southwestern United States. The study's results indicated that, when students were given a limited amount of time to engage in practice activities, there was no statistically significant difference among the three types of guided practice and the control group. What was effective, however, was the instructional component of this study's instruments.
ContributorsDelahunt, Michael (Author) / Erickson, Mary (Thesis advisor) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Young, Bernard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Lots of previous studies have analyzed human tutoring at great depths and have shown expert human tutors to produce effect sizes, which is twice of that produced by an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). However, there has been no consensus on which factor makes them so effective. It is important to know this, so that same phenomena can be replicated in an ITS in order to achieve the same level of proficiency as expert human tutors. Also, to the best of my knowledge no one has looked at student reactions when they are working with a computer based tutor. The answers to both these questions are needed in order to build a highly effective computer-based tutor. My research focuses on the second question. In the first phase of my thesis, I analyzed the behavior of students when they were working with a step-based tutor Andes, using verbal-protocol analysis. The accomplishment of doing this was that I got to know of some ways in which students use a step-based tutor which can pave way for the creation of more effective computer-based tutors. I found from the first phase of the research that students often keep trying to fix errors by guessing repeatedly instead of asking for help by clicking the hint button. This phenomenon is known as hint refusal. Surprisingly, a large portion of the student's foundering was due to hint refusal. The hypothesis tested in the second phase of the research is that hint refusal can be significantly reduced and learning can be significantly increased if Andes uses more unsolicited hints and meta hints. An unsolicited hint is a hint that is given without the student asking for one. A meta-hint is like an unsolicited hint in that it is given without the student asking for it, but it just prompts the student to click on the hint button. Two versions of Andes were compared: the original version and a new version that gave more unsolicited and meta-hints. During a two-hour experiment, there were large, statistically reliable differences in several performance measures suggesting that the new policy was more effective.
ContributorsRanganathan, Rajagopalan (Author) / VanLehn, Kurt (Thesis advisor) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Burleson, Winslow (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The purpose of this instructional design and development study was to describe, evaluate and improve the instructional design process and the work of interdisciplinary design teams. A National Science Foundation (NSF) funded, Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science (TUES) project was the foundation for this study. The project developed new curriculum materials to teach learning content in unsaturated soils in undergraduate geotechnical engineering classes, a subset of the civil engineering. The study describes the instructional design (ID) processes employed by the team members as they assess the need, develop the materials, disseminate the learning unit, and evaluate its effectiveness, along with the impact the instructional design process played in the success of the learning materials with regard to student achievement and faculty and student attitudes. Learning data were collected from undergraduate geotechnical engineering classes from eight partner universities across the country and Puerto Rico over three phases of implementation. Data were collected from students and faculty that included pretest/posttest scores and attitudinal survey questions. The findings indicated a significant growth in the learning with the students of the faculty who were provided all learning materials. The findings also indicated an overall faculty and student satisfaction with the instructional materials. Observational and anecdotal data were also collected in the form of team meeting notes, personal observations, interviews and design logs. Findings of these data indicated a preference with working on an interdisciplinary instructional design team. All these data assisted in the analysis of the ID process, providing a basis for descriptive and inferential data used to provide suggestions for improving the ID process and the work of interdisciplinary instructional design teams.
ContributorsOrnelas, Arthur (Author) / Savenye, Wilhelmina C. (Thesis advisor) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Bitter, Gary (Committee member) / Houston, Sandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This study was designed to test a new method of instruction for Japanese language students' re-acquisition of the Japanese relative clause structure. 10 Japanese language students who had already been exposed to the Japanese relative clause in their previous semester were asked to take a pretest that assessed their (a) knowledge of basic grammar concepts such as a "subject" and "predicate," (b) their ability to apply those basic grammar concepts to the Japanese language, and (c) their grasp of the rules applying to the formation of the Japanese relative clause. Students were then placed into a control group containing 6 students and an experimental group containing four students. The experimental group received additional lessons consisting of explicit instruction of basic grammar in both Japanese and English, as well as basic noun relativization rules in each language. The study found that the explicit instruction helped student comprehension of the relative clause structure, although some difficulties remain in identifying the relative clause and in constructing it on their own.
ContributorsHinojosa, Katie Crystine (Author) / Tomoko, Shimomura (Thesis director) / Ghanem, Carla (Committee member) / Chambers, Anthony (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate the effects of textual and visual annotations on Spanish listening comprehension and vocabulary acquisition in the context of an online multimedia listening activity. 95 students who were enrolled in different sections of first year Spanish classes at a community college and a large southwestern university were randomly assigned to one of four versions of an online multimedia listening activity that contained textual and visual annotations of several key words. Students then took a comprehension and vocabulary posttest and a survey to measure cognitive load and general attitudes towards the program. Results indicated that textual annotations had a significant positive effect on listening comprehension and that visual annotations had a significant positive effect on how successful students felt. No statistically significant differences were found for other variables. Participants also reported positive attitudes towards vocabulary annotations and expressed a desire to see more annotations during multimedia listening activities of this type. These findings provide further evidence of the impact that multimedia may have on language acquisition. These findings have implications for multimedia design and for future research. Language listening activities should include a variety of vocabulary annotations that may help students to understand what they hear and to help them learn new vocabulary. Further research is needed outside of the laboratory, in the online and increasingly-mobile language learning environment in order to align the research with the environment in which many students currently study. The incorporation of motivation into multimedia learning theory and cognitive load should be explored, as well as new measures of cognitive load.
ContributorsCottam, Michael Evan (Author) / Savenye, Wilhelmina (Thesis advisor) / Klein, James D. (Committee member) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010