Hercy N.H. Cheng

Central China Normal University · National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning

This paper examines and outlines the future exploration of AI companions, focusing on three main areas. Firstly, it defines AI companions as sophisticated AI entities designed for supporting and enhancing human experiences in daily activities, such as learning, working, and others. They encompass emotional, social, and practical aspects of daily li...

Indonesian workers in Taiwan have been taking synchronous online courses to enhance their education for several years. Still, the most crucial part of a synchronous course, the interaction quality, in the past, in general, was highly disturbed by the workers' busy daily work and had room to improve. Therefore, improving online interaction quality i...

Cognisant that the examination-driven culture in most Asian schools will hinder future educational innovation, a group of concerned Asian researchers started collaboration in 2014 to develop a theory to serve as a guide to design interest- driven learning activities. This endeavour then spawned the development of the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) T...

Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is a design theory that intends to inform the design of future education in Asia. It consists of three anchored concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. This paper presents the third anchored concept habit as well as the habit loop. IDC theory assumes that learners, when driven by interest, can be engage...

In this chapter, the authors demonstrate two cases of self-regulated learning behavior analysis in academic reading and writing. In the first case, graduate students are participated in a negotiated academic reading assessment, which provided additional opportunities to negotiate with the system for changing their estimated ability of academic read...

Abstract Conventional teacher-led instruction remains dominant in most elementary mathematics classrooms in Taiwan. Under such instruction, the teacher can rarely take care of all students. Many students may then continue to fall behind the standard of mathematics achievement and lose their interest in mathematics; they eventually give up on learni...

The interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is being developed as a group endeavor by Asian researchers to articulate a holistic learning design theory for future education in Asia. The theory hypothesizes that students, driven by interest, can be engaged in the creation of knowledge (generating ideas and artifacts). By repeating this creation process...

Online academic reading assessments can test graduate students' reading ability, while the results of tests as a feedback can help students reflect on their own ability, realize their weaknesses, and then take actions to improve their ability. These behaviors form the basis of self-regulated learning ability. In this paper, a negotiated online read...

Asian education is known for its examination-driven orientation, with the downsides of distorting the processes of learning and teaching, diminishing students’ interest in learning, and failing to nurture twenty-first century competencies among students. As a group of Asian researchers, we have been developing Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) Theory,...

Competition has been recently come to be recognized as a significant factor in the design of strategies for classroom-based learning. However, although the influences of cognitive factors (e.g., ability) and interpersonal factors (i.e., anonymity) on surrogate competitive learning have been investigated, there have been few studies emphasizing the...

As an overt expression of internal mental processes, discourses have become one main data source for the research of interactive learning. To deeply explore behavioral regularities among interactions, this study firstly adopts the content analysis method to summarize students’ engagement patterns within a course forum in a small private online cour...

Course reviews, which is designed as an interactive feedback channel in Massive Open Online Courses, has promoted the generation of large-scale text comments. These data, which contain not only learners' concerns, opinions and feelings toward courses, instructors, and platforms but also learners' interactions (e.g., post, reply), are generally subj...

Nowadays, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has obtained a rapid development and drawn much attention from the areas of learning analytics and artificial intelligence. There are lots of unstructured data being generated in online reviews area. The learning behavioral data become more and more diverse, and they prompt the emergence of big data in e...

This study developed a platform, entitled Parent–Teacher-Ark, to support parental engagement in their children’s education, and investigated parents’ online behaviors and perceptions in the platform. This platform consisted of the home–school communication bulletin, the parent–teacher forum, the online parental learning courses (OPC), and the multi...

The emergence of massive open online courses not only changes the ecology of higher education, but also facilitates a blending learning paradigm, also known as small private online courses (SPOCs). In order to understand how college students interact with an SPOC platform, this study collects their online behaviors for a semester and adopts a lag s...

In a MOOC environment, each student’s interaction with the course content is a crucial clue for learning analytics, which offers an opportunity to record learner activity of unprecedented scale. In online learning, the educators and the administrators need to get informed with students’ learning states since the performance of unsupervised learning...

Understanding students' testing behaviors may help researchers design better computer-based assessment. For this reason, this study aims at characterizing students' behavioral patterns in online reading test by k-means clustering. The clustering algorithm adopts eight indicators: reading time, answering time, the number of choosing articles, the nu...

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has been drawn much attention from learners and teachers through the world. MOOC offers a variety of interactive ways, in which the course comment panel is used for express students' opinions and feelings. These comments generally contain some learning problems, attitudes towards the course or the platform support,...

One-to-one technology, which allows every student to receive equal access to learning tasks through a personal computing device, has shown increasing potential for self-directed learning in elementary schools. With computer-supported self-directed learning (CS-SDL), students may set their own learning goals through the suggestions of the system bas...

Current research on learning analytics in China and abroad mainly focuses on structured data generated by learners in networked learning environment. However, because of the diversity of learning interaction patterns, more and more unstructured data primarily consisted of text are generated. In recent years, evaluating learners' knowledge and abili...

This study examined how to foster pupils' mathematical communication abilities by using tablet PCs. Students were encouraged to generate math creations (including mathematical representation, solution, and solution explanation of word problems) as their teaching materials and reciprocally tutor classmates to increase opportunities for mathematical...

Research indicates that the combination of correct and erroneous examples has a positive effect on knowledge acquisition and transfer if learners have adequate prior knowledge. If only erroneous examples were provided, students with low prior knowledge may need additional supports so that their procedural skills can be effectively promoted. For thi...

Although well-designed scaffolding may assist students to accomplish learning tasks, its insufficient capability to dynamically assess students' abilities and to adaptively support them may result in the problem of overscaffolding. Our previous project has also shown that students using scaffolds to solve mathematical word problems for a long time...

Research indicates that learning from erroneous examples (EE) is superior to correct examples because errors may provide students with a stimulus to spontaneously produce more self-explanations, leading to better learning outcomes. However, because most studies were conducted in individual settings, it remains an open question whether the advantage...

Because previous research has indicated a highly positive relationship between problem solving and posing, the process of problem solving can be adopted to design materials for problem posing. In this vein, the purpose of this study is to design a learning system for problem posing by annotated expressions through adoption-based research, in partic...

Scaffolding referred to adults helping a child in a process of tutorial interactions. However, when the novice who is scaffolded becomes capable, the scaffolds should be faded in order to return controls back to the students. In terms of Vygotsky’s theory (1978), capable people as a form of scaffolding can help students develop their potentials tha...

In Taiwan, primary mathematical education currently adopts teacher-centered learning. Teachers are the main source of course and students must to be engaged in the same activity in the same place at the same time. In this study, we designed a digital game-based learning system which called "Math Island" to help students' mathematics learning by the...

The purpose of this study is to contribute insights into how math creation integrated peer tutoring can facilitate students' mathematical expression and explanation. Twenty-five second-grade primary students play the role of teachers to construct their math creations as the teaching materials to teach their partners. Specifically, the students need...

Spiral curriculum is suitable for students' ability development in a teacher-centered learning. In a sense, current textbooks adopt spiral curriculum because teachers need textbooks to teach their students. However, in a learner-centered learning, textbooks leave little space for students to monitor their own learning. For this reason, this study a...

With the advance of technology, the price drop and the increasing reliance of personal computers showed possibilities on transforming our current education. As mentioned in Bloom's 2-sigma problem (Bloom, 1984), one-to-one classroom learning proved a significant learning outcome compared to the conventional. Therefore, with the assist of technology...

In schooling, high-ability students in a classroom always perform better, whereas low-ability students often perform worse. The stability of performance may hurt students¡¦ affects. However, students are engaged in games that they are playing. In most cases, they sometimes win and sometimes lose. This study terms such a property of games as ¡§the f...

As a medium for learning, digital games provide promising possibilities to motivate and engage students in subject learning. In this study, a game-based learning system, My-Pet-My-Quest, is developed to support pupils' math learning. This is due to the fact that most students in Taiwan have relatively lower positive attitude towards math learning,...

Learning retention is an important issue for instruction. However, traditional mathematics teachers tend to use direct instruction to tell students a formula, and ask them to keep in mind. But students may forget it very soon. This study adopts a variation based discovery learning strategy, which controls the similarity and difference among example...

Abstract In the last decade, more and more games have been developed for handheld devices. Furthermore, the popularity of handheld devices and increase of wireless computing can be taken advantage of to provide students with more learning opportunities. Games also could bring promising benefits – specifically, motivating students to learn/play, sus...

Researchers have started to apply games to education recently. Teachers can use computers to understand and manage students' learning statuses. However, games are seldom designed and used for teachers, who play important roles in the learning process. This study therefore applies the concept of a management game for teachers using students' learnin...

Previous study developed a game-based learning environment, entitled My-Pet-My-Quest (MPMQ), for arithmetic practices. The purpose of this study is to understand the learning process of game-based learning in long-term real world. The study considered to define how the behavioral patterns be implemented and which coding scheme be used in the behavi...

Homework has been considered an effective strategy in order to help students. However, previous studies indicated many contradictions for this because the effectiveness of homework should be discussed with teachers, parents and students. Hence, this study developed and applied a game-based network homework platform, entitled My-Pet-My-Quest (MPMQ),...

Mastering the skills in solving word problems is one of the important goals in elementary mathematics education; however, word problems are sometimes difficult for students, resulting in frustration. In this study, the authors design a small game, called Down! Down! Irised Boxes. When students make their effort to solve word problems, they can also...

Although competitive games have multi-fold benefits to students’ learning, such as motivation, satisfaction, and effectiveness, inappropriate competitive learning activities may have some negative impacts on students. From the literature, the authors have identified three main strategies which may reduce the negative impacts in competition game. Ho...

The objective of this paper is to develop a PDA-based learning game for mental computation, entitled EduTetris. As mental computation skills are used in everyday life, many researchers have indicated that mental computation skills facilitate students' arithmetic computation. It is important to teach students about the skills and strategies of menta...

Competition, despite its potential drawbacks, is an easily adopted and frequently used motivator in classrooms. Individual abilities, in the years of schooling, are inevitably different, and performance in competition is heavily ability dependent, resulting that more-able students always win while less-able students always lose. Students easily per...

The successful adoption of technologies in classrooms, we argue, relies on a greater emphasis on content-related pedagogical models for technology enhanced learning design. We propose the content-first design, an approach to creating content sample in the one-to-one classroom—classrooms with a wireless enabled computing device available for each st...

The outcome of competition is heavily ability dependent—the more-able students always win while the less-able lose. However, individual abilities are different. Students who consistently demonstrate lower performance than their peers may feel discouraged and frustrated. These lower-performance students hardly have the same winning probabilities as...

Many researchers are concerned about the effects of video games on learning, especially the games with virtual opponents; therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impacts. The authors designed Forest Defense, a digital game for practicing mental arithmetic, with two modes: training and challenge modes. In the challen...

During schooling, individual ability differences are inevitable. Low-ability students, when always performing worse, may feel discouraged and frustrated during learning; high-ability and hence better-performance students may not find learning interesting as well when facing easy challenges all the time. This study proposes an equal opportunity tact...

Puzzles can be regarded as problem-solving games, in which players have to solve the obstacle they confront. Solving puzzles helps players to foster logical thinking and to facilitate problem-solving strategies. In this paper, we base on four puzzle games, magic square, jigsaw puzzle, sudoku, and kakuro, and then we design a number puzzle game, cal...

Bingo is a universally known, popular, and easy-to-play game. Following bingo rules with some modifications, we have designed and implemented a game, called EduBingo, for practicing mathematics fractions. The game was implemented and experimented in a 'one-to-one' technology enhanced classroom, where every student learns with a wireless enabled com...

Some researches suggest that well-designed computer games can facilitate children's learning and motivation on mathematics (Klawe, 1998 and Randel et al., 1992). To sustain the fun in playing a learning game, according to the concept of "flow", students need a series of challenges to match their developing skills. This paper addresses two design qu...

Individual ability differences are an everlasting phenomenon in a classroom. Competitive learning games that aim at drawing students' attention and excitement will inevitably hurt the self-esteem of those students with lower-skill levels. This paper describes the design of a small group competitive classroom game called AnswerMatching. Besides, we...

The era of 1:1 educational computing environment where each student has one mobile computing device is not far away. When such technology designed for individuals is applied to group learning, several student grouping problems could be encountered. In this paper, three issues are identified to illustrate the vision of the 1:2 educational computing...

Physical manipulatives have been applied in traditional education for a long time. This paper proposes that by embedding computing power in manipulatives computers can monitor students' physical manipulations to support learning. This paper also describes the design of a digital desk prototype, called ArithmeticDesk to illustrate the vision of comp...

The era of 1:1 educational computing environment where each student has one mobile computing device is not far away. When such technology designed for individuals is applied to group learning, several student grouping problems could be encountered. In this paper, three issues are identified to illustrate the vision of the 1:2 educational computing...

The digital content has been considered as a core part of classroom learning. The way to input answers may influence student learning behaviors. This paper focuses on three computer-based input types—choice buttons, drag-and-drop, and text boxes—that are used frequently in arithmetical word problems of elementary schools. The experiment was conduct...

Virtual characters (including educational pedagogy agents and NPCs in games) are significant endeavors to benefit students' learning in technology-enhanced learning. In this paper, we propose a concept of character-driven learning, to address two related issues: how to establish close relationship with virtual characters and how to enhance students...