April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

As presented in Table 5, the proportion of papers in “Policies, social culture impacts and trends for technologyenhanced
learning” remained high in the “non-specified” learning domain from the first period to the second period
(residual values = 9.0, 8.8, respectively). Additionally, the learning domain in the “Development of New Learning
Systems, Platforms, and Architectures” topic changed from “Engineering” (first period) to “Arts & Languages”
(second period) (residuals = 2.2, 4.6, respectively).
Besides, over the second period, the research topics in “Adaptive and Personalized Technology-Enhanced Learning:
Knowledge and Competencies Management” attracted more attention in the “Engineering” learning domain (residual
= 4.9), while “Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning” and “Evaluation of Learning Systems, Platforms, and
Architectures” began to be addressed in the “Arts & Languages” field (residual = 3.6, 2.3). In addition, the topics in
“Computer Supported Collaborative Learning” expressed an increasing tendency in “Social Studies” (residual =
4.5) while the sub-categories of “Pedagogical Design and Theories” and “Artificial Intelligence in Education”
showed a gradually increasing tendency in the “Mathematics” learning domain (residuals = 2.3, 3.4, respectively).
Furthermore, the researchers who were interested in the “Science” learning domain paid more attention to the topics
in “Pedagogical Design and Theories” over the last five years (residual = 2.3).
Discussion
This study aims to explore the research trends for the TBL research articles based on their research topics, the sample
group selections, and the learning-domain adoption. The results are discussed as follows:
The trends of TBL in research topics, sample selections, and learning domain adoption
The findings from content analysis show that the “Pedagogical Design and Theories” was the most popular research
topic studied from 2000 to 2009 for the published TBL articles. Earlier TBL research was involved in debating
whether the technology influenced learning (Clark, 2001; Kozma, 1991) and what factors might affect the
instructions with various media representations (e.g., Mayer, 2001). Based on these valuable groundworks, many
follow-up studies have suggested that pedagogical design is the major factor impacting learning in the TBL
environment (Bernard, Abrami, Lou, & Borokhovski, 2004; Sitzmann, Kraiger, Stewart, & Wisher, 2006). As more
relevant studies were apparent, the initial TBL theoretical frameworks and instructional design models have been
established for enhancing and utilizing the TBL outcome (Koehler & Mishra, 2005; Clark & Mayer, 2008; O'Neil &
Perez, 2006). It is expected that more research will examine the effectiveness of these pedagogical models for
different TBL contexts in the future.
Additionally, the articles about “Motivation, Perceptions and Attitudes” have also increased between the two fiveyear-periods.
Research about individual difference and preference toward different technologies have been studied
since early twenty century and were limited in the traditional media such as texts, pictures, and video (Paivio, 1986;
Salomon, 1984). After the prevalence of computers and online tools, related research extended their efforts to the
advanced contexts such as animations, games, and Web-based learning. For example, learners' preferences or
acceptance with respect to the online learning activities and their expression of persistence in the cyber learning
environment were explored (Gan, 2005; Chen, Chen & Tsai, 2009; Yang & Tsai, 2008). Besides, a growing trend in
studying the topics of “self-regulation” and “metacognition” should also be expected (Chu & Tsai, 2009) as more
learner control functions are available from these latest advances than from traditional media.
The current study also shows that topics such as “Digital game and intelligent toy enhanced learning” have gained
more attention in the recent five years. The result implies that students today are facing more advanced gaming
experiences and educators started establishing a similar learning environment to help students maintain their
attention on the learning tasks. However, how the pedagogical principles and the entertainment aspects can be well
integrated will be a challenging issue to solve for future research (Harteveld, Guimarães, Mayer, & Bidarra, 2007).
By and large, the analyses of research topics by this paper (see Figure 1) suggest that in the last decade, the TBL
research tended to develop more appropriate pedagogical and motivation models to enhance TBL learning. In
addition, a small portion of research is increasing in finding whether learners' personalized learning experiences can
be strengthened by integrating the latest innovations into pedagogical practices (e.g. m-learning, u-learning).
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