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Full-Text Articles in Curriculum and Instruction
Assessing Online Discussion Forum Participation, Matthew Shaul
Assessing Online Discussion Forum Participation, Matthew Shaul
Faculty and Research Publications
As a socially constructive learning tool, discussion forums remain central to online education. They have continued to evolve in functionality, acquiring ever-increasing usability features. However, development has lagged in providing instructors the means to assess student work in forums. The author submits an overview of his software program that provides instructors with the means to evaluate forum work quickly, easily, and repeatedly. The software accomplishes this by accessing the forums' underlying database, searching for manifest and latent data, and calculating data associated with an array of metrics. This is a Web-based tool built on Open Source and standards-based languages, providing …
Pedagogical Agents As Learning Companions: The Impact Of Agent Emotion And Gender, Yanghee Kim, A. L. Baylor, E. Shen
Pedagogical Agents As Learning Companions: The Impact Of Agent Emotion And Gender, Yanghee Kim, A. L. Baylor, E. Shen
Yanghee Kim
The potential of emotional interaction between human and computer has recently interested researchers in human–computer interaction. The instructional impact of this interaction in learning environments has not been established, however. This study examined the impact of emotion and gender of a pedagogical agent as a learning companion (PAL) on social judgements, interest, self-efficacy, and learning. Two experiments investigated separately the effects of a PAL's emotional expression and empathetic response. Experiment 1 focused on emotional expression (positive vs. negative vs. neutral) and gender (male vs. female) with a sample of 142 male and female college students in a computer literacy course. …