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Automatically detecting a learner's stalled situation or deadlock in an educational support system using computers is very useful. This paper proposes a method for detecting such a deadlock on the basis of the record of a learner's operations and evaluates it by tests on human subjects. Specifically, it uses the moving variance of the operational time intervals to detect a deadlock. As a result, in about 80% of the practice problems with self-declarations of a deadlock by the subjects, the deadlock could be detected at a point in time prior to the self-declarations. In addition, deadlocks were detected by the proposed method in three cases in which states close to a deadlock had been determined from questions after the completion of the practice problems, even though there were no self-declarations. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(7): 63–75, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10256

A new method is proposed for rating the complexity of the information in an example-oriented textbook. Quantitative relations are studied between the proposed complexity and difficulty of understanding the textbook. The complexity of the information in the textbook is rated in terms of an information unit newly defined in this paper by the deformation of propositions. These information units are propositions that were previously unfamiliar to the learners using the textbook. In the case of causal relations among propositions, the number of preconditions affects the complexity of information and the number of preconditions is adopted as an attribute of the information unit (the “dimension” of the information unit) and are reflected in the rating of complexity of information. The difficulty of the textbook is indexed by the error rate of the answers to its exercises. A serial model is proposed in which the understanding of one learning item is achieved when every information unit included in the item is understood with no errors. We attempt to relate the complexity of the information and difficulty of learning quantitatively. By learning experiments using a C language textbook, the validity of the model and its usefulness are demonstrated. From the results of experiments, the difficulty increase corresponds to the increase in the number of information units and the number of preconditions. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 29(8): 9–18, 1998

We studied the factors which determine the difficulty of practice problems in a computer language textbook. The extraction of these factors from such complex problems requires considerable effort, and after extraction these factors are difficult to analyze because of their large number. An additional difficulty is that these factors cannot include the full range of human cognitive characteristics involved in problem solving. To overcome these problems, we took the following two steps. First, we undertook an analysis with formal factors, namely the knowledge and inferences required to solve a problem, and estimated the degree of difficulty. Second we conducted an error analysis on specific problems which included some deviation from the formal factors, and extracted the factors required for a special cognitive load. Our model was then made more accurate by including these factors among those which were found to be significant. In this way, we estimated the difficulty of practice problems quantitatively, and showed the effectiveness of the proposed method by means of an experiment using an actual C language textbook.

The objective of the study is to improve teacher efficiency so that large numbers of students can be educated, while at the same time implementing an individual approach to education in which each student's progress is taken into account. To achieve this objective, we propose an education system for groups of students at a similar stage of learning. With this system, CAI is used to help individual students to learn by themselves and networks are used to constantly monitor their progress. Then students who reach an impasse are grouped according to their learning progress. The teacher can then provide a supplementary lesson for the whole group, thus improving his or her efficiency. Moreover, we undertook an education experiment for 2 teacher subjects and 10 student subjects using the proposed system. The teacher work rate results indicated that a single teacher using this system to teach approximately 20 students can provide efficient supplementary lessons to plateau-status students, even when students diverge from each other in terms of progress.

情報科学科では平成15年度に2年生全員を対象にノートPCを2年間貸し出し、情報教育に利用する施策を実施した。本報告はこのノートPCを利用した教育を研究メンバの教員が実施し、その結果明らかになった有効性や問題点を述べるものである。なお本研究の詳細は本報の原報「神奈川大学理学部情報科学科におけるノートパソコンを利用した情報教育の試み」に述べている。そちらもご参照頂ければ幸いである。

The wavelength‐dependent loss increase in the long wavelength region is revealed for phosphor‐doped silica fiber at a high temperature around 200 °C. The loss increases around 1.3 μm and becomes larger for longer wavelength regions. The loss increase is suppressed by reducing P2O5 dopant concentration. The overtone absorption of Ge–OH at 1.41 μm as well as that of Si–OH at 1.39 μm also increases markedly. The possible origin of the loss increase is discussed.