**3.1. The pedagogical instrument as a didactic artefact**

The didactic characteristics of the pedagogical instrument are related to teaching intentions calculated in precedence levels. Pedagogical knowledge concerns all didactic knowledge, which does not depend on the domain of reading. The pedagogical characteristics of the instrument relate to the holding information about the didactic usage and quality of the entities belonging to other domains. Its elements are all the entities including a certain number of didactic attributes. There are two kinds of didactic entities, related to either conceptual or instructional entities. Each entity has a priority depending on its importance as part of the learning process (a measure of the importance to the student). For example, the pedagogical intention: <"Present text without reading"; "display the word on the screen"; "suggest help" > is associated with the "Visual comparison strategy" to be implemented by the learner.

The instrument is to be considered as an artefact representing the pedagogical material to be used by the learner. As for the symbolic characteristics of the instrument, it is difficult to show in a detailed way the exact nature of the cognitive instruments that the learner uses or the role of the didactic artefacts used in the text reading activity. Such a process is by nature very complex requiring a definition of not just the instrument's components but rather its actual molecules according to an advanced microscopic design approach. Thus, the instrument as a didactic artefact means in our view a meta-instrument enabling the learner to construct his/ her own cognitive instruments as the didactic activity progresses. Variation in the mode or time of the instrument's intervention may have different effects according to its pedagogical function, for example, a help instrument which intervenes only after a certain number of mistakes. So the didactic role here can address different kinds of skills (the intervention mode of the help instrument, when left to the learner's initiative, may increase his/her metacognitive skills, for example). The pedagogical instrument is individualized after using the basis firstly of the knowledge collected from the student model and secondly on that illustrated in the properties of learning object (its content). An example of a pedagogical instrument is "the text field" that can be considered as a support of the text. The text is considered as knowledge representing its content associated with its different scenarios of use. Among the examples of cognitive instruments constructed by the learner in the presenting of text activity, we will mention the following:

A dictionary access instrument (decoding—dictionary access): a tool that the learner constructs in order to access the dictionary; the activation is both automatic and on two levels: (1) activation of the spelling and phonological information of the word to enable reliable and accurate coding and (2) activation of the semantic information followed by a selection of the information which is relevant to the context.

A morphological processing instrument: such instruments are constructed and used by learners in a text reading situation, during the reading activity, which is a special situation at the limits of the recognition and comprehension processes. According to the specialists, morphological analysis skills are poorly developed prior to learning how to read. Directionality in writing involves greater processing of words according to their morphological structure; furthermore the morphological structure of words is more explicit in writing. The mediation of this instrument constructed by the learner depends on one of the following prospective outcomes:

• The morphologically complex words are systematically analysed in order to be recognized, and in this case the morphological analysis is clear;

Or

**3. Application of microscopic approaches in the learning to read** 

Our approach is applied in the context of a theoretical and development project for a multiagent and knowledge-based computer for teaching and learning reading. It's related to the mother tongue (French) and addressed to children in normal schooling in their first year of primary school. The microscopic approach to design is centred on the components of learning object which is characterized, firstly, by knowledge being brought into play for learning and secondly by materials considered as the medium for this knowledge (**Figure 1**). The basic idea is that the learning objects would be staged, (instantiation of the content, preparing the list of the instrument to be used and finally specifying the scenario of each pedagogical instrument),

Our proposal lies in the use of the rational agent, which individualizes its parameters according to the student model and using three types of rules (didactic rule related to the learning domain, pedagogical rules concerned by the general teaching rules independently of learning to read domain and finally linguistic rules). So the sequencing of the learning object reveals the various aspects of learning activity: (1) its contents which represent the primary teaching matter, (2) its interface which is represented as a set of pedagogical instruments constituting the teaching equipment and finally (3) the scenario of use of each pedagogical instrument.

The sequencing is done by the learning object sequencing agent. It uses its dynamically built knowledge bases starting from the agents of the environment and the knowledge defined the contents to find all suitable methods for creating the scenario of each pedagogical instrument. The detailed modelling of the agent and its reasoning is not the subject of this article. Our goal is to specify the micro-design of the instrument as multifaceted artefact by the application of

The didactic characteristics of the pedagogical instrument are related to teaching intentions calculated in precedence levels. Pedagogical knowledge concerns all didactic knowledge, which does not depend on the domain of reading. The pedagogical characteristics of the instrument relate to the holding information about the didactic usage and quality of the entities belonging to other domains. Its elements are all the entities including a certain number of didactic attributes. There are two kinds of didactic entities, related to either conceptual or instructional entities. Each entity has a priority depending on its importance as part of the learning process (a measure of the importance to the student). For example, the pedagogical intention: <"Present text without reading"; "display the word on the screen"; "suggest help" > is associated with the "Visual comparison strategy" to be implemented by the learner. The instrument is to be considered as an artefact representing the pedagogical material to be used by the learner. As for the symbolic characteristics of the instrument, it is difficult to show in a detailed way the exact nature of the cognitive instruments that the learner uses or the role of the didactic artefacts used in the text reading activity. Such a process is by nature very complex requiring a definition of not just the instrument's components but rather its actual

**domain**

98 Active Learning - Beyond the Future

a process referred to as "sequencing".

projection technique.

**3.1. The pedagogical instrument as a didactic artefact**

• All the derived forms have their own unique access code obviating the need for morphological analysis.

There is a strong assumption that the vocabulary is morphologically organized with, however, each derived from having its own entry. According to different parameters (frequency, position of the affix), however, morphological analysis actively contributes to the selection of a given item and takes its place at the early stages of development (the semantic and syntactic roles of suffixes in word recognition and in comprehension).

The other cognitive instruments involved in the activity are linked to each interface instrument. This principle has been presented above according to the theoretical foundations of activity theory. Thus, each artefact is associated with an object of the activity which becomes an instrument in the course of the didactic activity.

#### **3.2. The micro-components of a knowledge object**

The text is the most complex knowledge object related to the learning to read domain; it acts of as a complex task to be accomplished by the learner during his/her reading of the text. The learning is in the form of a syntactic analysis of sequences of identified words, a realization of their significance and the combination and integration of the clauses deduced from the various clues (morphological, morpho-syntactic and pragmatic). The status of the knowledge for learning could be regarded as a combination of other statuses of knowledge at the same time as it could be for a single status; this status would be given according to the various statuses of the different micro-components of the knowledge objects. The focus on these micro-components can explain some micro-complications arising when the learner starts to recognize the letters using micro-components of this knowledge corresponding to the learning activity.

metacognitive competencies. After the use of the help instrument by the learner, the system

Innovative Approach for Renewing Instructional Design Applied in the Context of e-Learning

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.82246

101

Cognitive state (metacognitive competencies, skill at using help, high (degree of mastery)).

The instrument is described by the interface model by specifying its shape and its different way of use, which can be described as methods in the object-oriented paradigm where the pedagogical instrument is an object and the predefined methods for this object can be regarded as possible scenarios for its use. For example, if we have the text field in the didactic situation "presentation of the text". The different methods of presentation of this text can be considered as the possible scenarios to be presented to the learner (global reading of the text, reading sentence by sentence, reading word for word,). These different ways of reading the text give details of the tasks progress of the system which are associated with the constraints calculated from the student model. For example, if we detect from the behaviour of the learner that he/she has an impulsive character (the Answer validation button and next activity button should be hidden until the end of the tasks proposed by the system (**Figures 3** and **4**). The interface model of the instrument must integrate this element as a property of the interface instrument (the Answer validation button). The interface of the instrument should be adapted to the kind of learner; the reflective learner will have different types of interface [15, 16].

The visual style is characterized by the more effectiveness for the learner's memory by using vision; the auditory style is related to audition and the kinesthetic style concerns everything we touch. The difference between tactile and kinesthetic styles is that tactile style is characterized by a fondness for sense of touch. Kinesthetic learners need body movement and frequent breaks in activity [17]. The intervention modes of the interface instruments for visual learners should be centred on the visual aspect rather than an oral aspect (an example is the intervention mode of a Re-read Sentence instrument by blinking instead of providing an oral message for auditory learners). It is very difficult to apply kinesthetic stimuli because we haven't yet integrated touch screens in our system. As discussed above (Section 1) this difficulty shows a relationship between the micro-design and ICT. We need to integrate kinesthetic stimuli in the interface model of the instrument, which introduces a new type of problem in relation with new technology. The pedagogical instrument is the tool that activates these stimuli and allows

When the total design is sufficiently advanced, work can begin on the design of individualizing the process of learning materials by connecting different models. We will demonstrate this by specifying the decision variables of our illustrative models. Knowing that each knowledge object has possible statutes in the student's model: known, un-known, recognized and possible context where the student has constructed this status or modified its value, the

saves the news cognitive state of the learner in its knowledge bases as follows:

**3.5. Pedagogical instrument surrounded by different types of stimulus**

the learner to make the most of his/her abilities to understand and to learn.

**3.6. Connecting different models of the instrument**

**3.4. Pedagogical instrument and the scenario of use**
