• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
• /
• v.33 no.1
• /
• pp.172-180
• /
• 2014

The first purpose of this study is to distinguish difficult chapters in 'Speed of objects' chapter and find the factors which give difficulty to the teachers and students. Also, it attempts to compare the students' assessment scores with the degree of difficulty in teaching and also with the degree of difficulty in learning. This report is expected to help science teachers develop their PCK(Pedagogical Content Knowledge) for teaching the chapter professionally. 15 teachers who had taught the 'Speed of Objects' chapter and their 386 students took part in the survey to acquire information about the difficulties in teaching and learning. 386 students also received a test to examine their understandings of the chapter. The results of this study are as follow; First, the degree of teachers' and students' difficulty is only affected by the contents, and the degree of onerousness felt by teachers is higher than that of students. Second, The topics caused higher difficulty to teachers were 'Understanding the meaning of motion(2nd lesson)', 'Understanding the meaning and unit of speed(5th lesson)', 'Changing unit of speed(6th lesson)', 'Drawing a distance-time graph(7th lesson)', and 'Understanding the relative motion(10th). The topics that led higher difficulty to students were the contents of 5th, 6th, and 7th lessons. Third, the 'Speed of Objects' chapter can be divided into 4 types of difficulty according to the degree of teaching and learning; 'Strong difficulty', 'Learning difficulty', 'Weak difficulty', and 'Teaching difficulty'. Last, students showed low achievement to the tasks that were related with 'Strong difficulty' and 'Teaching difficulty'.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.83-91
• /
• 2011

Much research has been conducted on the e-learning systems for recommending a learning content to a student based on the difficulty of it. The difficulty is one of the most important factors for selecting a learning content. In the existing learning content recommendation systems, the difficulty of a learning content is determined by the creator. Therefore, it is not easy to apply a standard rule to the difficulty as it is determined by a subjective method. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based method for determining the difficulty of a learning content in order to provide an objective measurement. Previously, ontologies and knowledge maps have been used to recommend a learning content. However, their methods have the same problem because the difficulty is also determined by the creator. In this research, we use an ontology representing the IS-A relationships between words. The difficulty of a learning content is the sum of the weighted path lengths of the words in the learning content. By using this kind of difficulty, we can provide an objective measurement and recommend the proper learning content most suitable for the student's current level.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.3-12
• /
• 2014

Quick and accurate learning of diverse electronic products has become an important daily task. In particular, software occupies core status in the control and operation of the products. This research tested the effects of learning method, schedule, and task difficulty in the learning of software. Using 2 (learning method: experiential vs. verbal) ${\times}$ 2 (learning schedule: spaced vs. massed) ${\times}$ 2 (difficulty: easy vs. difficult) between-subjects design, Experiment 1 tested participants' learning of file control using Windows Movie Maker. There was no effect of learning schedule on task completion time, but participants in experiential learning were faster in the completion of evaluation task compared with those in verbal learning condition. Importantly, as task difficulty increases participants in verbal condition showed markedly lower performance than those in experiential condition, which suggests that experiential learning is more effective with more difficult learning task. That is, in case of learning simple operation of software verbal learning using linguistic manual or instruction could be sufficient; on the other hand in case of learning complex operation learning from experience or tutorial mode would be more effective. Additional studies which manipulated task difficulty (Expt. 2) and inter-trial learning interval (Expt. 3) did not produce meaningful results.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.15 no.4
• /
• pp.75-94
• /
• 2009

This study was designed to assess demotivation factors and compare the factor between two secondary school student groups. It furthermore examined how the factors related to students' L2 proficiency. A 31-item questionnaire was completed by 407 junior (JH) and senior high school (SH) students. Five factors were extracted through the principal axis factoring: Teachers' competence and teaching styles, Dissatisfaction with English classes and grading system, Difficulty of learning English, Lack of motivation and interest in learning English, and Inadequate learning contents. Although both JH and SH students did not perceive their English teacher as a strong attribution of demotivation, Difficulty of learning English and Dissatisfaction with English classes and grading system were the two strongest demotivating factors. When compared the overall mean scores of each factor between JH and SH groups, significant differences were found in all factors except Factor 4, with SH students reporting stronger demotivation. JH students attributed their demotivation to Difficulty of learning English, while SH students attributed that to Dissatisfaction with English classes and grading system. Both groups tended to attribute their demotivation to external forces. The study also showed that several demotivation factors related negatively to L2 proficiency.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
• /
• v.33 no.3
• /
• pp.597-606
• /
• 2014

The purpose of this study is to survey and analyze difficulties in teaching and learning elementary school science on the chapter titled 'electric circuit'. 28 elementary school teachers who teach 5th grade science and 73 5th grade students in elementary school were taken part in this survey. The pilot questionnaire was distributed to find out both the degree and the reason of difficulties in teaching and learning. The answers are analyzed with four areas to extract elements which make class difficult; Learner factors (L), Instruction factors (I), Curriculum & textbooks factors (C), and Environment factors (E). The results are as follows. (1) It can be seen that both students and teachers feel the highest difficulty in 7th lesson 'the direction of current', while they felt little difficulty in lesson 3 'conductor and nonconductor' and lesson 8 'the safety of electricity'. (2) The most mentioned reason of difficulties in teaching and learning was Learner factors (L). (3) Teachers felt many difficulties in experimental environment. On the other hands, students didn't think experimental failures as serious trouble. (4) Students felt many difficulties in new terms and hazy concepts or expressions. (5) Teachers felt a lot of difficulties in those from Curriculum & textbooks factors.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
• /
• v.12 no.9
• /
• pp.93-98
• /
• 2021

The change of programming language learning experience on learning motivation was analyzed. Learning a programming language is generally evaluated as a difficult process even for majors. Measuring psychological changes related to programming learning at this point in expanding to non-majors is necessary for learner analysis. The overall learner attitude change was investigated by measuring achievement goals, academic interest, academic self-efficacy, cognitive involvement, and academic self-regulation, which are motivation-related factors. All factors related to learning attitude showed a decrease in the post-test results. This result is interpreted that the difficulty of the learning process decreased the motivation to learn programming. It was found that the greater the difficulty perceived by the learner, the greater the decrease in the motivation to learn. Based on the results of this study, it has implications that a learning environment and learning process that can give feedback and a situation that can reduce the level of learning difficulty felt by learners should be systematically given.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
• /
• v.45 no.4
• /
• pp.68-73
• /
• 2008

In this research, we proposed a learner tailoring question recommendation system for web based learning evaluation system. For teaming evaluation process, this system used the item difficulty Each question was stored and managed to the question bank. Item difficulty was recalculated during teaming process and feedback in next course. For learner tailoring question recommendation, learner could choice the teaming part and set the learning difficulty. In application result of proposal method, almost learner could improve learning score by controling teaming difficulty.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.67-75
• /
• 2020

The 'level of difficulty' is one of the major factors for learners when selecting learning contents. However, the criteria for the difficulty level is mostly defined by the contents providers. This approach does not support the personalized education which should consider the abilities and environments of various learners. In this research, the knowledge of the learners and contents were formalized and generalized to resolve the issue, and object models, including a metric for personalized difficulty level, were designed in order to be applied for experiments. And then, based on 100 contents for music education and 20 learners, we performed simulations with an implemented tool to validate our approach. The experimental results showed that our method can calculate the personalized difficulty levels considering the similarities between the knowledges from the learning state and the contents. Our approach can be effectively applied to the on-line learning management system which contains easy access to the learning state and contents data.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
• /
• v.27 no.4
• /
• pp.420-436
• /
• 2008

The purpose of this study was to investigate and analysis the elementary teachers' and students' views about the difficulties in teaching and learning in geology units of elementary school science. For the purpose of this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted individually with seventeen elementary teachers who have serviced more than three years, and with sixteen elementary students located in Cheongju City. The interview questions were developed through Seidman's step to acquire a reliability in the interview data with triangulation, then in-depth interview questions were modified and completed through pre-interview after constructing the trustworthiness of interviewees. In-depth interviews were performed in applying the analytic induction method and the interviews were recorded. From the interviews, we found that elementary teachers' views about the difficulties in teaching geology units; teachers' inner difficulties, the difficulty of lab activities, the problems of rock samples, the problems of curriculum in geology units, the difficulty of the geological feature, the problems of the cramming education, the lack of the opportunity for the speciality, and so on. And the students have the views about the difficulties in learning geology units; the difficulty of the unit contents understanding, the problems of learning by heart, the lack of the interest, the lack of materials, the problems of rock samples, the difficulty of the field learning, and so on. Based on the results, the study suggested that an interesting lab activities should be included in the geology units and taught in the geological field trip to help elementary school students more fully comprehend contents of the geology units.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.66-72
• /
• 2023

Little attention appears to have been paid to the relevance of learning a good representation function in solving long tail tasks. Therefore, we propose a new loss function to ensure a good representation is learnt while learning to classify. We call this loss function Triplet Class-Wise Difficulty-Based (TriCDB-CE) Loss. It is a combination of the Triplet Loss and Class-wise Difficulty-Based Cross-Entropy (CDB-CE) Loss. We prove its effectiveness empirically by performing experiments on three benchmark datasets. We find improvement in accuracy after comparing with some baseline methods. For instance, in the CIFAR-10-LT, 7 percentage points (pp) increase relative to the CDB-CE Loss was recorded. There is more room for improvement on Places-LT.