Pedagogical agents were found to enhance learning but studies on the emotional effects of such agents are still missing. While first results show that pedagogical agents with an emotionally positive design might especially foster learning, these findings might depend on the gender of the agent and the learner. This study investigated whether…

During COVID, HyFlex gained popularity and became a "new normal" that educators need to consider as an effective instructional approach. Previous research offers conflicting findings related to the impact of HyFlex instruction on students' basic psychological needs and academic performance. Our investigation provides insight into a…

A web design course has complex and diverse skills, which may attract students with an interest in technology and art fields to learn to program. It makes a need to have a flexible learning framework to develop all students to learn in a programming course. This study was designed to develop students' learning achievement and computational…

Around the world, programming education is actively promoted by such factors as economic and technical requirements. The use of a robot in programming education could help students understand computer-science concepts more easily. In this study we designed a course in programming a robot for elementary school students and investigated its…

Instructional theory is intended to guide instructional designers in selecting the best instructional methods for a given situation. There have been numerous qualitative investigations into how instructional designers make decisions and the alignment of those decisions with theoretical influences. The purpose of this research is to more…

The purpose of this research was to probe the philosophical beliefs of instructional designers using sound philosophical constructs and quantitative data collection and analysis. We investigated the philosophical and methodological beliefs of instructional designers, including 152 instructional design faculty members and 118 non-faculty…

Educators and learning theorists suggest that play is one of the most important venues for learning, and games a useful educational tool. This study considers game activity preferences of middle school-aged children, so that educational games might be made more appealing to them. Based on children's activity modes identified in our prior research,…

Research suggests students' use of information and communication technology (ICT) may be more a matter of digital literacy and access rather than a generational trait. We sought to identify ICT preferences of post-secondary students (N = 580) through a Digital Propensity Index (DPI), investigating communication methods, Internet practices and the…