The Impact of Affective Tutoring System and Information Literacy on Elementary School Students’ Cognitive Load and Learning Outcomes

Abstract

In this study, an affective tutoring system (ATS) is developed by integrating dengue fever prevention courses with an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) under a semantic identification module for a teaching experiment. A one-group pretest-posttest research design is adopted for this teaching experiment, which involves 66 research participants and lasts for two weeks. Further, students are divided into a high score group and a low score group based on students’ information literacy and cognitive load, and nine students are selected to participate in a focus group interview. Our research team uses a “primary school information literacy questionnaire” and a “primary school student’s cognitive load scale”, qualitative research methods, and auxiliary quantitative research methods to cross-verify the effect of the dengue fever prevention affective tutoring system on the cognitive load and learning outcomes of primary school students with different level of information literacy. According to results of this study, both qualitative and quantitative analysis endorse the hypothesis that the dengue fever prevention affective tutoring system enhances students’ learning outcomes. Students with varied information literacy show significantly different cognitive load, yet there is no significant difference in students’ overall cognitive load, content of cognitive load, and learning outcomes. Quantitative analysis shows partially significantly negative correlation between students’ information literacy and cognitive load, yet the correlation between students’ information literacy, cognitive load, and learning outcomes is not endorsed by quantitative analysis.