This article describes the design of an interactive learning environment to increase student achievement in secondary schools by addressing students’ preconceptions, and promoting purposeful social collaboration, distributed cognition, and contextual learning. The paper presents the framework that guided our design efforts to immerse all students in a progression of guided-inquiry hands-on acti...

We compared the amounts of learning achieved using two different instructional approaches under controlled conditions. We measured the learning of a specific set of topics and objectives when taught by 3 hours of traditional lecture given by an experienced highly rated instructor and 3 hours of instruction given by a trained but inexperienced instructor using instruction based on research in co...

Given the prevalence of digital resource use in education, it is critical to understand teachers’ interactions and perceptions when retrieving digital video for instructional purposes. The overarching objective of the present study was to examine how user-centric measures varied between different groups of science teachers, formed on certain user characteristics. An experimental methodology, in...

In this paper we introduce a rubric for assessing quality of open educational resources and open courseware based on our socio-constructivist quality model (QORE) that includes 70 criteria grouped in four categories related with content, instructional design, technology, and courseware evaluation. Quality is assessed from an educational point of view, i.e. how useful are such resources for vari...

When developing serious games the most complex task is the alignment of instructional teaching methods and the game itself. To address this issue, we propose a shared language modeling approach for educational instructors and game developers. The language is based on so called serious game bricks, composites and rules. Combining these pedagogical and story elements allows the domain experts to ...

A learning process, at any level of instruction and training, normally incorporates the following actions [1]: (a) establishing the objectives of the learning process; (b) finding and revising (or creating) instructional material; (c) assessing students’ level of knowledge; (d) assigning appropriate material to students; (e) defining the form of access students have to components/modules; (f) r...

Web engineering constitutes the employment of an engineering approach to the development of Web applications. Its main teaching objectives are for students to learn what an engineering approach represents and how measurement can be applied. This paper presents the application of the Cognitive Flexibility Theory as an instructional theory to teach Web Engineering principles. Results obtained ove...

Learning objectives (LOs) are statements of intent that describe what a student will know and be able to do at the end of a course. However, the definition of well-formed LOs is a challenge in instructional design. This paper describes a competency-based approach to support the integrated definition of LOs in learning, education and training systems. This approach is based on a system-wide defi...

Objective intelligibility measures are increasingly being used to assess the performance of speech processing algorithms, e.g. for hearing aids. It has been shown that the short time objective intelligibility (STOI) measure yields good results in this respect. In this paper we propose a binaural extension of the STOI measure, which predicts binaural advantage using a modified equalization cance...

This work in progress examines cognitive scaffolding in the instructional design of contemporary computer documentation. It illustrates how the cognitive theories of advance organizers, load theory, and normal ordering may be applied to educational technology and classroom instruction to create more effective computer documentation. I will research the macrostructures common in contemporary com...