Abstract

This paper describes the didactic strategies and the educational material offered by the adaptive educational hypermedia system MATHEMA. The general aim of the MATHEMA is the support of senior high school students, through an interactive and constructivist environment, to learn physics (electromagnetism) individually and/or collaboratively, and to overcome their possible misconceptions and learning difficulties as well. A primary principle of individualized learning is that no single didactic strategy is the best for all students. As a consequence, students will be able to achieve learning goals more efficiently when pedagogical procedures are adapted to their individual differences. The learning style describes individual differences in learning. In order to support multiple didactic strategies taking into account the students’ learning style, we chose Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory and we adopted the following didactic approaches in the MATHEMA: presentation of theory and examples, questions on video simulations, exercise solving, and problem solving by using experimentation through simulations, explorations, guided discovery, and collaboration in pairs. Didactic approaches and educational material are adapted by the MATHEMA to the students according to their learning style. An experimental study with senior high school students indicated that they improve their performances when studying through the MATHEMA.