INTEGRATING THE LEARNING CYCLE AND THE VARIATION THEORY FOR ENHANCING CONCEPT COMPREHENSION IN WEB-BASED COURSES

Concept comprehension is an important foundation for more complex thoughts and deliberations. To enhance concept comprehension, in classroom lectures teachers have been using instructional strategies and specific course designs, which have been proven effective. To confirm the hypothesis that by integrating instructional strategies in the course designs, an e-learning system would enhance the concept comprehension, this study proposes a framework that integrates the learning cycle with the variation theory in the course design for a web-based e-learning system. A pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental is used to test whether the framework is feasible. Two types of web-based courses, based on a science textbook of the primary school, are designed for the experiments: one course comprises no instructional strategy at all and the other adheres to the framework. The participants of the experiments were 120 fifth-grade students in Taiwan. The results of the experiments show that the average score on the comprehension of course concepts of the experimental group, which uses the courses adhering to the framework, is significantly higher than that of the control group, which uses the courses having no instructional strategy. This confirms that the coherent, explicit and systematic framework is feasible for designing web-based e-learning courses for effectively enhancing concept comprehension, and so as the hypothesis.