Contents
e-Learning Methodologies
Introduction
Basic Drill Procedure
Drills
Item Characteristics
Item Selection and Queuing Procedures
Feedback
Item Grouping Procedures
Introduction
Drills are used primarily for the third phase of the
instruction cycle (present information, guiding the
learner, practice, test knowledge).
Drills, like tutorials are an objectivism methodology.
Drills, in combination with tutorials and other
methodologies, provide practice and are useful for
learning information in which fluency is required, such as
basic math skills, foreign languages, spelling and language
usage, and vocabulary.
A valid criticism of drills is that they do not teach but
merely provide practice for the learner who is already
familiar to some degree with the subject matter
Basic Drill Procedure
Most drills have a fairly regular structure consisting
of an introductory section followed by a cycle that is
repeated many times. This cycle includes:
Selection of an item
Item display
Learner respond
Response judgment
Feedback to learner about the response
Item Characteristics
Item refer to all the presentation and response
events in a drill.
Items are used in drills in the same manner as
questions are used in Tutorials. Items typically have
the form of paired associate.
A paired associate is pair of related words, concepts,
or multimedia elements:
Dog – σκύλος
A musical tone and its name (c-charp)
A spoken word and its spelling
Countries and their capitals
Pictures of objects and the words identifying them
Item Characteristics
The main item characteristics that influence
the design of drills are:
Item types
Hints
Judgments
Pace and Pacing
Item Creation
Item Difficulty
Item Characteristics =>
Item Characteristics =>
The following are item types commonly used in
computer drills:
A drills may have hints associated with each item.
Hints vary widely. If the stimulus is a picture of a bird
and the response is to click to click on one to four
names the hint may be:
Item Types
Text to text: English to Greek translation
Auditory to text: hearing an English word and selecting or
typing the Greek word
Text to pictorial: reading a bird name and selecting the bird
picture
Pictorial to text : seeing a bird picture and typing or selecting
its name
Auditory to pictorial: hearing a piano note and selecting its
note on a scale
Pictorial to auditory: seeing a bird picture and selecting its
song or call
Textual to numeric: reading a math word problem and typing a
number
Hints
To hear its song
To be given a classification (song bird, bird of prey,
flightless, extinct)
To eliminate one or two of the alternatives
To identify the region in which it is (or was) found
The advantage of hints is that they may improve the
memorability of the content by capitalizing on the
organization principle of memory.
The disadvantage is that they slow down pace
Item Characteristics =>
Item Characteristics =>
In a given drill, not all items are the same
difficulty. The difficulty factor can be
treated in one of the following ways:
Drills often emphasize fluency, a part of which
is speed of responding.
Item Difficulty
Keep difficulty constant
Increase difficulty based on learner performance
Group items by difficulty
Item Characteristics =>
Items Creation
Item Lists and Item Generation Algorithms
Selection from List (for example language’s
vocabulary)
Generation by an Algorithm (for example math
problems)
Pace and Pacing
The pace of a drill is how quickly the drill moves
from item to item
Pacing means giving the learner a limited amount of
time to respond to an item or group of items
Item Selection and
Queuing procedures
In a drill that uses selection from a list, the selection
procedure is a crucial factor. The selection procedure
refers to the rules the program follows to select an
item for each iteration of the drill cycle.
Most drills use random item selection, which, is the
least efficient and least effective item selection
method. Item selection based on learner’s performance,
on the other hand, improves almost any drill.
Drills rely largely on the principle of repetition and
recall. Information just encountered is easily stored in
short memory, but also easily lost. Recall is enhanced by
moving from short-term to long term memory. Item
selection should be designed with this process in mind.
Item Selection and
Queuing procedures
Item Selection and Queuing =>
Flashcard Queuing
There are two main categories for item selection:
Random Selection. The disadvantage of this type of
selection is that
Correctly and incorrectly paired items have the same
probability to be encountered again
The learner may respond incorrectly to an item, be told the
correct answer, but then forgot the answer before the item is
selected and presented again.
Organized Queuing determines in a systematic way the
order in which the items are presented. The main
techniques belonging to this category are:
Flashcard queuing
Variable Interval Performance Queuing
Item Selection and Queuing =>
Variable Interval Performance Queuing
Item Selection and Queuing =>
Retirement Criteria
When a learner responds correctly to an item several
times, we assume the learner probably knows the
answer
An efficient drill should stop presenting such an item
and give greater emphasis on those items with poor
performance
The criterion for taking an item out of the list is
called the retirement criterion
The retirement criteria began as two correct answers in a
row
Whenever a word was missed, it was placed in three new
position in the queue. Thus, once an item was missed, its
retirement criterion changes to three correct answers in a
row
Item Selection and Queuing =>
Choice of Queuing Parameters
Queuing parameters such as:
Number of insertions
Insertion positions
Retirement criteria
should be selected through a pilot testing in
order allow efficient and effective drills to
be created.
Feedback
Most of the factors concerning feedback in tutorials
apply to drills as well.
An additional factor that is especially relevant in drills is
feedback following discrimination errors
When beginning a drill, a learner makes errors that are simply
wrong. As learning progresses the most common error is
confusion among items’ responses
In drills, discrimination error is defined as a response that is
correct for any other item in the list. This is commonly called
within-list error.
In contrast, an out-of-list error (a response that is not correct
for any other item in the list) is not a discrimination error
The above definition of discrimination error is important
because allows the program to provide feedback for
eliminating them.
Item Selection and Queuing =>
Termination
If a drill retires items as the learner responds
correctly to them, it may terminate when all items have
been retired. However, implementing this criterion for
termination causes two problems:
After all but a few items have been retired the original
positions for reinsertion may be impossible
The drill become very tedious when the same two or three items
are repeated over and over
Three ways to correct these problems are:
Altering queuing parameters, such as the reinsertion positions.
However, this method solves only the first of the above
problems
Resurrection, takes items, previously retired, and reinserts
them in the future queue
Premature termination, means terminating the drill when all bu a
small number of items are retired.
Item Grouping Procedures
There are two main techniques for item grouping:
Subdrill grouping, where groups are constructed to
require about 15 minutes for mastery, and to:
⌧Keep difficulty constant
⌧Take advantage of the organization principle
⌧Minimize discrimination errors
Endless-continuum, where the list should be
ordered to increase gradually in difficulty and
minimize discrimination errors. Every time an item is
retired it is replaced by the next item in the list,
keeping the active items in drill constant
Item Grouping Procedures =>
Subdrill Grouping
In subdrill grouping there are four important factors:
Group size, should be selected so as to produce drills sessions
which require about 15 minutes for being mastered
Assigning Items to Groups.
Grouping items by difficulty (same difficulty)
Grouping by the likelihood of discrimination errors. In the beginning of
learning confusable items should be kept separated while at the end
learning confusable items should be kept in the same subdrill
Group items based on semantics (organization principle).
Group selection. The drill begins with a group of easy items and, as
performance improves, switches to more difficult groups
Review of items. The most difficult items of previous subdrills
should be inserted periodically to the current drill so as to ensure
that these items will not be forgotten