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Abstract: This study measured high-school learners'' cognitive load as they interacted with different web-based curriculum components, and examined the interactions between cognitive load and web-based concept learning. Participants in this study were 105 11th graders from an academic senior high school in Taiwan. An online, multimedia curriculum on the topic of global warming, which lasted for four weeks, provided the learning context. After students worked through the curriculum, their feelings about the degree of mental effort that it took to complete the learning tasks were measured by self-report on a 9-point Likert scale. An online test and the flow-map method were applied to assess participants'' concept achievements. The results showed that curriculum components such as scientific articles, online notebooks, flash animations and the online test induced a relatively high cognitive load, and that a lower cognitive load resulted in better concept achievement. Also, students appeared to adopt different learning approaches that were corresponding to different levels of cognitive load. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Psychological studies have shown that personal beliefs about learning and environmental preferences affect learning behaviors. However, these learner characteristics have not been widely discussed in the web-based context. By developing questionnaires, this study attempted to detect learners’ web-based learning environmental preferences (WLEP) and beliefs about web-based learning (BWL). The scope of WLEP focused on the pedagogical dimension of the web-based learning environment, while BWL concerned the attributes and control factors of the web-based learning. There were about five hundreds of Taiwan university students participating in the study. Through factor analysis, the scales discussed in the study revealed a satisfactory validity and reliability in assessing students’ preferences and beliefs. Further analyses showed that university students preferred more of individual and structured instructional configurations while expected the outward mode of interaction. In general, students held a rather contextual belief about web-based learning, which was found to be correlated with their environmental preferences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study employed an eye-tracking technique to examine students’ visual attention when solving a multiple-choice science problem. Six university students participated in a problem-solving task to predict occurrences of landslide hazards from four images representing four combinations of four factors. Participants’ responses and visual attention were recorded by an eye tracker. Participants were asked to think aloud during the entire task. A 4 (options) × 4 (factors) repeated measures design, two paired t-tests and effect sizes analyses were conducted to compare the fixation duration between chosen and rejected options and between relevant and irrelevant factors. Content analyses were performed to analyze participants’ responses and think aloud protocols and to examine individual’s Hot Zone image. Finally, sequential analysis on fixated LookZones was further utilized to compare the scan patterns between successful and unsuccessful problem solvers. The results showed that, while solving an image-based multiple-choice science problem, students, in general, paid more attention to chosen options than rejected alternatives, and spent more time inspecting relevant factors than irrelevant ones. Additionally, successful problem solvers focused more on relevant factors, while unsuccessful problem solvers experienced difficulties in decoding the problem, in recognizing the relevant factors, and in self-regulating of concentration. Future study can be done to examine the reliability and the usability of providing adaptive instructional scaffoldings for problem solving according to students’ visual attention allocations and transformations in a larger scale. Eye-tracking techniques are suggested to be used to deeply explore the cognitive process during e-learning and be applied to future online assessment systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]