Though engineering digital game inclusion in undergraduate classrooms has steadily increased over the last two decades for in-person courses, their use has exponentially
increased in remote and contactless higher education learning environments. Studies exploring student technological acceptance of and content mastery from the use of engineering digital games have provided mixed results in terms of student enjoyment,
engagement, and game effectiveness. The majority of these studies have relied on pre- and post-questionnaires to assess differences in students’ gaming experiences and performance in the game and learning environment. However, quantitative methods such as the measurement of physiological responses during gameplay have been less explored for the exploration of student engagement and education. The goal of this work is to explore how a set of eye - tracking metrics can be related to gamer attention to in-game
stimuli and game interface areas of interest.
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The impact of goal assignment in a game‐based learning environment
Goal setting has been established in the literature as a critical component of self‐regulated learning and for effective problem‐solving. Yet, surprisingly little attention has been focused on goal‐directed behaviour in digital game‐based learning environments (GBLEs) despite their expanding use in educational contexts.
The current study examined the impact of goal assignment in a GBLE aligned with curricular objectives and played in a classroom context.
Eighth‐grade students (
Two important results emerged that contribute to the existing literature on goals and GBLEs. First, assignment to the mastery goal condition resulted in significantly higher enjoyment ratings and monitoring judgements but not game performance while considering the influence of pre‐existing goal‐orientation. Second, self‐reported mastery goal orientation and videogame play frequency predicted enjoyment in the game.
The results suggest that enjoyment can be facilitated by orienting students to adopt mastery goals and that developers should consider integrating mastery‐based instructions in their GBLEs. Moreover, instructional goals can influence students regardless of incoming goal orientations.
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10478672
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Computer Assisted Learning
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0266-4909
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 848-858
- Size(s):
- ["p. 848-858"]
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Success in online and blended courses requires engaging in self-regulated learning (SRL), especially for challenging STEM disciplines, such as physics. This involves students planning how they will navigate course assignments and activities, setting goals for completion, monitoring their progress and content understanding, and reflecting on how they completed each assignment. Based on Winne & Hadwin’s COPES model, SRL is a series of events that temporally unfold during learning, impacted by changing internal and external factors, such as goal orientation and content difficulty. Thus, as goal orientation and content difficulty change throughout a course, so might students’ use of SRL processes. This paper studies how students’ SRL behavior and achievement goal orientation change over time in a large ( N = 250) college introductory level physics course taught online. Students’ achievement goal orientation was measured by repeated administration of the achievement goals questionnaire-revised (AGQ-R). Students’ SRL behavior was measured by analyzing their clickstream event traces interacting with online learning modules via a combination of trace clustering and process mining. Event traces were first divided into groups similar in nature using agglomerative clustering, with similarity between traces determined based on a set of derived characteristics most reflective of students’ SRL processes. We then generated causal nets for each cluster of traces via process mining and interpreted the underlying behavior and strategy of each causal net according to the COPES SRL framework. We then measured the frequency at which students adopted each causal net and assessed whether the adoption of different causal nets was associated with responses to the AGQ-R. By repeating the analysis for three sets of online learning modules assigned at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester, we examined how the frequency of each causal net changed over time, and how the change correlated with changes to the AGQ-R responses. Results have implications for measuring the temporal nature of SRL during online learning, as well as the factors impacting the use of SRL processes in an online physics course. Results also provide guidance for developing online instructional materials that foster effective SRL for students with different motivational profiles.more » « less
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Incorporating games in teaching can help students retain material and become innovative problem solvers through engagement and enjoyment. Here we describe a new board game, “Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized,” and its use as an active learning tool (material available at doi: 10.18738/T8/NQV2CU). The educational objective is to teach the player about taphonomy and fossilization, while the gameplay objective is to preserve and recover the best fossil collection. Through competitive gameplay, students learn how chemical, physical, and environmental factors, as well as physiology and discovery biases can influence an organism’s preservation and collection potential. The game is modeled after an Early Jurassic fossil deposit for scientific accuracy and relevance. The game was incorporated in undergraduate classroom activities in 20 colleges and universities across the United States. Survey results show that students and teachers were overwhelmingly positive about the game, stating that it was fun and helped them learn or strengthen their knowledge of fossilization. When analyzed statistically, we find that students’ self-reported learning outcomes and opinions vary most significantly with college year, major, ethnicity, and race. White students and geoscience or STEM majors reported the highest levels of learning and enjoyment, with minorities and non-STEM majors responding less favorably. We suggest this game is most advantageous for use in upper-level paleontology classrooms, although it is still beneficial at lower levels. It is critical to use this game as part of a larger lesson plan and tailor it to fit the needs of an individual classroom. Modifications for time and class size, as well as follow-up discussion questions, are included.more » « less
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Introduction Self-regulated learning (SRL), or learners’ ability to monitor and change their own cognitive, affective, metacognitive, and motivational processes, encompasses several operations that should be deployed during learning including Searching, Monitoring, Assembling, Rehearsing, and Translating (SMART). Scaffolds are needed within GBLEs to both increase learning outcomes and promote the accurate and efficient use of SRL SMART operations. This study aims to examine how restricted agency (i.e., control over one’s actions) can be used to scaffold learners’ SMART operations as they learn about microbiology with Crystal Island, a game-based learning environment.
Methods Undergraduate students (
N = 94) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) Full Agency, where participants were able to make their own decisions about which actions they could take; and (2) Partial Agency, where participants were required to follow a pre-defined path that dictated the order in which buildings were visited, restricting one’s control. As participants played Crystal Island, participants’ multimodal data (i.e., log files, eye tracking) were collected to identify instances where participants deployed SMART operations.Results Results from this study support restricted agency as a successful scaffold of both learning outcomes and SRL SMART operations, where learners who were scaffolded demonstrated more efficient and accurate use of SMART operations.
Discussion This study provides implications for future scaffolds to better support SRL SMART operations during learning and discussions for future directions for future studies scaffolding SRL during game-based learning.
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