A Progressive Prompting Approach to Conducting Context-Aware Learning Activities for Natural Science Courses

摘要

Owing to the popularity of mobile, wireless communication and sensing technologies, issues related to contextual mobile learning have widely been discussed in recent years. In the meantime, researchers have indicated the importance of developing effective strategies for guiding students to learn in context-aware learning environments. In this study, a progressive prompt-based context-aware learning approach is proposed to improve the learning performance of students. An experiment was conducted on a natural science course of an elementary school to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. From the experimental results, it is found that the proposed approach could effectively enhance the learning achievement of the students in comparison with the conventional context-aware learning system with single-stage prompts. It is also interesting to find that the proposed approach, by providing more challenging tasks, encouraged the students to put more effort into examining the contextual information and interpreting the learning content. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 1. A progressive prompt-based strategy is proposed for supporting contextual u-learning activities. 2. A contextual learning system has been developed and an experiment has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. 3. This approach has been applied to a contextual learning activity of an elementary school natural science course. 4. The approach is helpful to students in improving their learning achievement. 5. The approach is able to encourage students to put more effort into examining the contextual information and interpreting the learning content during the contextual learning process.