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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Web-based programming has become a popular and vital issue in recent years. The rapid growth of various applications not only demonstrates the importance of web-based programming, but also reveals the difficulty of training relevant skills. The difficulty is owing to the lack of facilities such as online coding, debugging and peer help to assist the students in promoting their cognitive development in web-based programming. To cope with these problems, in this paper, a web-based programming assisted system, “WPAS”, is proposed, which is able to support five programming activities with various difficulty levels of cognition based on Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy. WPAS provides online coding, debugging and annotation tools to conduct the training and peer assessment for web-based programming. Experimental results of 47 undergraduate students show that the innovative approach is helpful to the students in improving their cognitive development in Web-based programming. In addition, according to the results of the questionnaire, most of the participants perceived the ease of use and usefulness of the proposed system. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers could design Web-based programming activities supported by the WPAS system to improve students’ cognitive development in web-based programming. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]