This paper describes an evaluation to verify the reliability, sensitivity, and effectiveness of the checklist. An improvement of the checklist is also described. The checklist, based on flow theory, was developed as a support tool for teachers and courseware designers to redesign learning materials and environments from the view point of motivational design. After the literature review of the applied research on flow theory to the educational field, it is found that there are few practical tools proposed. This paper focuses on the formative evaluation of the flow-theory-based checklist, which has been already proposed, and the verification of its reliability, sensitivity, and effectiveness. To carry out the whole evaluation experiment, the e-learning materials were developed and the preliminary experiment, the expert review, and the evaluation experiment were performed. As a result, the checklist is found to be practical enough and the future tasks are clarified.

Language arts are a technique to communicate with others to make the partner understand one's own intention precisely. This is similar to programming, where the partner is a computer. This paper describes the influence of an ability of language arts on a student in an introductory programming course. Our method is organized to measure students' (1) explanation ability of another person and for a child of age five and (2) effort of programming task by counting compile operations. Statistical hypothesis tests were conducted with such data. Results indicate that student's ability of language arts has no significant influence on effort by writing a first compile-error-free program, but significant influence on effort by modifying and completing the program.