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Curricula enhanced through the use of digital games can benefit students in their interest and learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) concepts. Elementary teachers’ likelihood to embrace and use game-enhanced instructional approaches with integrity in mathematics has not been extensively studied. In this study, a sequential mixed methods design was employed to investigate the feasibility of a game-enhanced supplemental fraction curriculum in elementary classrooms, including how teachers implemented the curriculum, their perspectives and experiences as they used it, and their students’ resulting fraction learning and STEM interest. Teachers implemented the supplemental curriculum with varying adherence but had common experiences throughout their implementation. Teachers expressed experiences related to (1) time, (2) curriculum being too different, and (3) too difficult for students. Their strategies to handle those phenomena varied. Teachers that demonstrated higher adherence to the game-enhanced supplemental fraction curriculum had students that displayed higher STEM interest and fraction learning. While this study helps to better understand elementary teachers’ experiences with game-enhanced mathematics curricula, implications for further research and program development are also discussed.

 

People with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM as well as information, communication, and technology (ICT) careers. The underrepresentation of individuals with disabilities in STEM may reflect systemic issues of access. Curricular materials that allow students to demonstrate their current fraction knowledge through multiple means and provide opportunities to share and explain their thinking with others may address issues of access students face in elementary school. In this study, we employed a sequential mixed-methods design to investigate how game-enhanced fraction intervention impacts students’ fraction knowledge, engagement, and STEM interests. Quantitative results revealed statistically significant effects of the program on students’ fraction understanding and engagement but not their STEM interest. Qualitative analyses revealed three themes—(1) Accessible, Enjoyable Learning, (2) Can’t Relate, and (3) Dreaming Bigger—that provided contextual backing for the quantitative results. Implications for future research and development are shared.

 

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. 

Abstract. To examine relations between achievement goal orientation—a construct of motivation, metacognition and learning, multiple data channels were collected from 58 students while problem solving in a game-based learning environment. Results suggest students with different goal orientations use metacognitive processes differently but found no differences in learning. Findings have implications for measuring motivation using multiple data channels to design adaptive game-based learning environments.