Distance-learning courseware discrimination for discernment ability training

Training students in the discernment ability is an important task in distance education. To improve the training results, this chapter makes the following contributions: (1) suggests Web courseware on controversial social issues with different viewpoints for discernment training; (2) constructs the courseware for Discernment Ability using a method called DRPA. This method is presented with five algorithms, forextracting representative phrases, calculating characteristic array, determining the threshold array, objective judgment and subjective judgment; (3) proposes and proves that a new concept, called Gymnastics Threshold, is more accurate than traditional threshold; and (4) uses extensive experiments to show that DRPA is much more efficient and accurate than traditional method. Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc.