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Types of Strategies


Notes:

Researchers in the area of cognitive psychology suggest that matching users’ learning styles with the design of instruction is an important factor with regard to learning outcome. A number of experiments indicate that the users’ performance is much better if the teaching methods are matched to the preferred learning style.
However, a common problem is that learners do not know what their learning style is. There are free and commercially available questionnaires that can be used to decide on different classifications of learning styles. In some cases the learner has to answer 40 questions, from which an inference engine decides what the learning style is. Only after this questionnaire can the actual learning process start.
We take a different approach: we may ask a few simple questions, like a media preference, and we try to infer the learning style from the user’s browsing behavior. This is still highly experimental, and the real outcome of combining the inference of a learning style with the adaptation to that learning style is still unknown.
The adaptation that we can perform includes not only the selection of media items, but also the ordering of information items, depending on their type, in addition to on their information content and some prerequisite relationships. The ordering can be done through changing the available links between pages, or through reordering paragraphs or sections within the pages.