The effects of a hypermedia CAI system on the academic achievement of elementary school students in Korea

Abstract

This study examines the effectiveness of a CAI system on students' academicachievement. After developing an experimental hypermedia CAI system, an experiment usingthis system on a group of elementary school students was performed, and the data from theexperiment were then analyzed statistically.An experimental hypermedia CAI system with an emphasis on improving reading skillswas developed using Hanol 3.0 on an IBM compatible PC. The pedagogical material for thisexperimental system came from the first chapter of a standard social science textbook for fifthgrade students in Korea. The study involved 55 students in total, who were divided into anexperimental group of 27 students and a control group of 28 students. For the final 15 minutesof a 40-minute class, the experimental group studied with the experimental hypermedia CAIsystem, while the control group studied in the traditional manner. This experiment wasrepeated for 19 class hours.A post-test with 30 questions designed to measure academic achievement was conductedon both groups of students at the end of the experiment. The average and the standarddeviation of scores for the experimental group are 25.18 and 3.43 respectively, and 22.57 and2.96 for the control group.In order to determine whether academic achievement for the experimental group wasbetter than that of the control group, a t-test on the two populations was performed at the 5%level of significance. From the analysis of the t-test, it is concluded that the academicachievement for the experimental group is significantly better than that of the control group.This fact tells us that the experimental hypermedia CAI system had a positive effect on thestudents' academic achievement.