Pedagogical agents in multimedia learning environments have frequently been designed to produce pointing gestures (deictic) to direct spatial awareness. Although this might be beneficial for native English‐speaking students who possess high levels of comprehension, only using pointing gestures with foreign language students learning English is problematic because these students need more assistance with language comprehension than just directing spatial awareness. The purpose of this study was to explore how gesture type and gesture frequency help foreign language students perceive the agent’s persona and the ability to recall procedural information. The results found one significant interaction between average gestures and no gesture in terms of facilitation, but all other conditions and persona subscales were not significant. For learning outcomes, the enhanced gesture condition significantly recalled more information than the no gesture condition (p = 0.017), and was approaching significance with the conversational gesture condition (p = 0.059). The findings suggest that when the learning population consists of foreign language students, pedagogical agents should use representational and beat gestures to help students comprehend more of the language, and the gesture frequency needs to be increased to account for the lack of verbal listening skills with this population.
An ultrasensitive fluorescent water sensor based on a dipodal bimane-Cu(II) complex is reported here. This complex, which is non-fluorescent in the absence of water, demonstrates a remarkable turn-on fluorescence in...
We demonstrate a simple method of stretching DNA to its full length, suitable for optical imaging and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Two competing forces on the DNA molecules, which are the electrostatic attraction between positively charged dye molecules (YOYO-1) intercalated into DNA and the negatively charged surface of glass substrate, and the centrifugal force of the rotating substrate, are mainly responsible for the effective stretching and the dispersion of single strands of DNA. The density of stretched DNA molecules could be controlled by the concentration of the dye-stained DNA solution. Stretching of single DNA molecules was confirmed by AFM imaging and the photoluminescence spectra of single DNA molecule stained with YOYO-1 were obtained, suggesting that our method is useful for spectroscopic analysis of DNA at the single molecule level.
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