103524017 宋靜昀 Adding self-explanation prompts to an educational computer game

Abstract

Proponents envision a role for computer games in improving student learning of academic material, including mathematics and science. Asking learners to engage in self-explanations during learning has been found to be an effective instructional method. In the present experiment, we examined the effects of adding a self-explanation prompt—asking players to answer one of three questions after completing each level of the game—within a children’s math game on addition of fractions. Middle-school participants played either a base version of the game (n = 57) or the base version with a self-explanation instructional feature (n = 57). Participants’ learning was measured by a fractions post-test and their learning processes measured via in-game measures of game progress and errors. When we separated the self-explanation condition into participants who used a focused self-explanation strategy versus those who did not, the focused participants had significantly fewer game level deaths, game level resets, and progressed significantly farther in the game, compared to the control group, than participants not using a focused self-explanation strategy. The major new contribution of this study is that self-explanation can help the process of playing educational games in some situations and hurt in others. In particular, the most effective self-explanation prompts were aimed at helping learners make connections between game terminology and mathematics terminology, whereas the least effective self-explanation prompts asked very simple or very abstract questions.

Fig. 1 shows a screen shot of the game Save Patch.

Conclusion

Performance in the Patch game was improved when students responded to focused self-explanation prompts about the connections between concrete elements in the game (e.g., coil length) and abstract mathematics terminology (e.g., fractions such as 1/4 or 1/2 or 1/3), but not when self-explanation prompts asked very simple or very abstract questions. In short, self-explanation prompts in a fraction game were most effective when they were designed to reduce extraneous processing by explicitly guiding students’ cognitive processing (Mayer, 2009) and foster generative processing by helping students connect abstractprocedural knowledge and concrete conceptual knowledge (Kilpatrick et al., 2001).

FROM：

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321300263X




利用數位式遊戲學習，使學習者把抽象的數學概念轉換為簡易的圖形，並利用遊戲的方式和遊戲中所提供的提示，控制遊戲中人物前後移動回答數學中分數的概念，建構具體的數學概念。