Understanding the difficulty factors for learning materials: a qualitative study

Abstract

Identifying the difficulty of learning materials enables learners to choose the most appropriate learning materials for their knowledge stages and helps them choose easier one between two different learning materials that deal with the same topic. This study aims at constructing a model of learning material difficulty, utilizing a qualitative study method. Based upon the identified difficulty factors, it also attempted to run a categorization process to group the similar topics together, in order to provide more generic view of the model. Furthermore, this study examines which difficulty factors are more influential for the easiest learning materials and for the hardest learning materials, respectively. In this study, the main experimental data are based on the format of PPT, which is the most common presentation file for college students.