Researches On Theories And Practices Of Designing VLEs Promoting The Development Of Advanced Cognition

The thesis is the production of a key item authorized by the Chinese National"Tenth Five Year"Educational Science Planning. The research has analyzed and summrized systematically the situation of ICT application in education and the development of various Virtual Learning Envrionments (VLEs) and their application in China and abroad. Based on this work and the orgnazitional structures and pedagogical characters of Chinese schools, a VLE, named PRIME has been designed and developed. It has confirmed the validity and the application ways of the VLEs referred to educational experiments. It has also formed some new instructional methods and learning strategies based on PRIME which can be applied directly in classroom.The research adopts the modified"Development Research"method to design and develop PRIME, which aims to promote the process of knowledge-building and knowledge management and the development of advanced cogniton. From the lessons of the two editions development process, the development of VLEs should break through the notions of metaphor and the pedagogical confirmative evaluation is an indispensable step to develop an educational software system.Using multivariate ANOVA, the thesis has analysed the data of the confirmative experiments. The results demonstrates that the system has the function to promote the development of advanced cognition and the acquisition of advanced knowledge, and especially, that the PRIME has improved significantly the development of general metacognition, subject learning strategies, ICT literacy, etc. Concretely, the total scores of GOALS have significant differences between the experiment and control groups (F=5.507, p=0.021), male and female (F=7.939, p=0.006); their interaction (F=4.298, p=0.041) is also significant. Subject learning strategies have significant differences between grades (F=5.382, p=0.005), the experiment and control groups (F=9.275, p=0.003).Based on the repetitive pilot of PRIME in different subjects'instruction, such as in reading, writing, ICT, and math, it is found that some intructional models and students'learning strategies have broken through the conventionalities of the integrating ICT into curriculum, thus formed particular instructional patterns. These patterns have supported effectively the processes of learning and teaching and establised a mechanism of PRIME application in classroom. The experiment results show that there are significant correlations between the students'achievements and activity indexes, achievements and advanced cognitions, such as subject learning strategies, general metacognition (plan, regulated abilities), ICT literacy. In the other words, the advanced cognition maybe plays a very important role between the acadimic achievements and the applications of PRIME.The thesis hereby puts forward some opinions about how to apply PRIME to organize instruction and learning activities in classroom, including instruction design, learning activities plan and management, instructional routines construction. Additionally the thesis has also explored the issues of the developmental process of Virtual Learning Community (VLC) in the school. It concludes that teaching and learning are the cores of community activities and the teachers exert profound influences on the development of VLC. Home-school link is its powerful application fashion in this condition. Finally, the thesis has put out some shortages in the research and several emphases for future study. It then suggests some ideas about how to perfect the PRIME and generalize those educational experiments.In a word, advanced cognition and advanced knowledge are the mediated variables by which ICT can assist students to improve their achievements; the effective application of PRIME can be taken for important appraoches of integrating ICT deepenly into curriculum as well as effective appraoches of promoting advanced cognition. Thus the thesis suggests that the VLEs which promote the development of advanced cognition and acquisition of advanced knowledge can be regarded as a new research paradigm of ICT appliction in education.The thesis utilizes self-edited Subject Learning Strategy Questionnaire to assess students'subject learning strategy, and the Chinese edition GOALS for development of advanced cognition. It assesses the students'learning achievements according to two terminal exams; the data (activity indexes) recorded by PRIME are also important analysis indexes. The thesis employs SPSS 12.0 as data analysis tool.