Enhancing Students’ Learning of Factual Knowledge

Abstract

Factual knowledge is one of the most common types of knowledge that students are expected to learn. Factual knowledge may be described as the basic information about a particular subject or discipline that students must be acquainted with. This may include the terminology and the specific details or elements of a subject (Anderson and Krathwohl in A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing. Longman, New York, 2001). Acquiring factual knowledge is important to students because it serves as basic building blocks to understand the larger relationships among important information that define a subject. This chapter reports two recent empirical studies that examined the effect of using blended learning approaches on the learning of a particular factual knowledge—English vocabulary. The first study (Jung and Lee in Multimedia Assist Lang Learn 16(4):67–96, 2013) employed a one-group pre- and post-test design to investigate the impact of a blended learning approach that utilized Internet video clips on 21 Korean students’ vocabulary development. Overall, students showed a significant increase in test scores. The second study (Jia et al. Comput Educ, 58:63–76, 2012) employed a quasi-experiment design to study the effects of a blended learning approach utilizing individualized vocabulary review and assessment in Moodle on 47 Chinese students’ vocabulary knowledge. The results from an independent t-test revealed that students who used the blended learning approach performed significantly better in vocabulary tests compared to the control class which did not use the approach. We summarize the main lessons learned by cross comparing the key pedagogical and instructional strategies used in the two studies, and present these in the Conclusion section.