Using design-based research to develop a Mobile Learning Framework for Assessment Feedback

Students’ lack of engagement with their assessment feedback and the lack of dialogue and communication for feedback are some of the issues that affect educational institutions. Despite the affordance that mobile technologies could bring in terms of assessment feedback, research in this area is scarce. The main obstacle for research on mobile learning assessment feedback is the lack of a cohesive and unified mobile learning framework. This paper thus presents a Mobile Learning Framework for Assessment Feedback (MLFAF), developed using a design-based research approach. The framework emerged from the observation of, and reflection upon, the different stages of a research project that investigated the use of a mobile web application for summative and formative assessment feedback. MLFAF can be used as a foundation to study the requirements when developing and implementing wide-scale mobile learning initiatives that underpin longitudinal practices, as opposed to short-term practices. The paper also provides design considerations and implementation guidelines for the use of mobile technology in assessment feedback to increase student engagement and foster dialogic feedback communication channels

Engaging the 'Xbox generation of learners' in Higher Education

The research project identifies examples of technology used to empower learning of Secondary school pupils that could be used to inform students’ engagement in learning with technology in the Higher Education sector. Research was carried out in five partnership Secondary schools and one associate Secondary school to investigate how pupils learn with technology in lessons and to identify the pedagogy underpinning such learning. Data was collected through individual interviews with pupils, group interviews with members of the schools’ councils, lesson observations, interviews with teachers, pupil surveys, teacher surveys, and a case study of a learning event. In addition, data was collected on students’ learning with technology at the university through group interviews with students and student surveys in the School of Education and Professional Development, and through surveys completed by students across various university departments. University tutors, researchers, academic staff, learning technology advisers, and cross sector partners from the local authority participated in focus group interviews on the challenges facing Higher Education in engaging new generations of students, who have grown up in the digital age, in successful scholarly learning

Demonstrating the validity of the Video Game Functional Assessment-Revised (VGFA-R)

Problematic video play has been well documented over the course of the last decade. So much so the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) has included problematic video gaming as disorder categorized as Internet Gaming Disorder. The field of applied behavior analysis has been utilizing functional assessments for the last 30 years and has showed evidence of effective results across different populations and environments. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation (comprising three studies) was to validate an indirect functional assessment entitled the Video Game Functional Assessment-Revised (VGFA-R). Using academic experts in the field of video game addiction and applied behavioral analysis (n=6), the first study examined the content validity of the VGFA-R and was able to demonstrate the assessment exceeded the criterion for an established assessment. A second study comprising a survey of 467 gamers examined the factorability by using a confirmatory factor analysis, and found that VGFA-R had an overall variance above .60. Within the third laboratory-based study using gamers (n=11), the VGFA-R was examined for construct validity and found the VGFA-R was able to predict 85% of the appropriate function of behavior. Implications of the study are discussed along with the strengths and limitations of the study and future research directions

Building a Better Game: A Theory of Gameful Learning & the Construction of Student Personas with Agency

Gameful course design creates learning environments that support student motivation, drawing inspiration from well-designed games. This dissertation establishes the theoretical framework on which gameful pedagogy is founded. One key piece of gameful course design is that the instructor creates opportunities for students to make decisions about how they will complete course work. Designing these opportunities requires instructors to reflect on how different types of students are likely to behave, and to decide what grade outcomes can be earned through different routes of action. The field of Human-Computer Interaction uses a design tool called personas to help software developers better understand target users and their respective goals as they build new technologies. This dissertation investigates what choices students made within a gameful course, with the intention of developing a method to systematically construct student personas, based on a combination of behavioral, performance, demographic, and psycho-social data. Such personas would ideally enable instructors to more finely tune gameful course structures to student needs. While this research succeeded in establishing a method to describe the pathways students took through the gameful course studied, it identified very little commonality in students’ choices at the assignment level: the 159 students studied took 158 unique pathways through the core assignment work. This finding speaks to the success of gameful course design in enabling students to have autonomy over their learning experience, but, in addition to a general lack of significant findings between basic student characteristics and assignment choice, did not allow for the creation of data-driven personas that felt cohesive and representative of the students they represented. Three goals for future research into data-driven personas are identified: First, to confirm in a larger and more diverse context that the characteristics examined in this study do not have strong relationships to assignment choice. Second, to re-evaluate whether characteristics like ethnicity and gender need to be included in learner personas at all if they do not offer a better understanding of how similar learners are likely to behave. And third, to investigate whether it is more valuable to iterative course design to focus on how different behavior patterns relate to each and impact each other rather than assuming that the patterns themselves will relate to any particular learner characteristic.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144070/1/cholma_1.pd

Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learnin

Technology-enhanced Personalised Learning: Untangling the Evidence

Technology-enhanced personalised learning is not yet common in Germany, which is why we have tasked scientists with summarising the current status of international research on the matter. This study demonstrates the great potential of technology in implementing effective personalised learning. Nevertheless, it has not been assessed yet whether the practical implementation actually works: Even in countries such as the U.S., which lead the way in using techology in classroom settings, hardly any evaluation studies have been done to prove the effectiveness of technology-enhanced personalised learning. In the light of the above, the authors make recommendations for actions to be taken in Germany to make best use of the potential of technology in providing individual support and guidance to students

Changing the way we build games: a design-based research study examining the implementation of homemade powerpoint games in the classroom

This design-based research study examined the effects of a game design project on student test performance, with refinements made to the implementation after each of the three iterations of the study. The changes to the implementation over the three iterations were based on the literature for the three justifications for the use of homemade PowerPoint games in the classroom: constructionism, microthemes, and question writing. A review of the literature for the justifications found that the game project, as implemented in previous studies using homemade PowerPoint games, did not align well with the justifications. After three iterations of the study, students who created homemade PowerPoint games did perform better on assessments than students who either did not create games, created games as a review, or created games as part of an unstructured unit project. However, these differences were not statistically significant. As part of the third iteration, two of the individual justifications were tested in isolation to whether gains could be seen without creating games. While the students who were part of interventions involving microthemes and question writing did perform better than students who did not receive the interventions, the differences were not statistically significant. Future research in the area of game design as an instructional tool should look to replicate these studies, as some of the sample sizes were small. Future research should also examine additional changes to the implementation of a game design project, including the use of other programming languages

Improving student engagement in higher education through Mobile-Based Interactive Teaching Model using Socrative

One of the main problem in higher education teaching is low students’ levels of engagement leading to poor learning performance. Broad teaching strategies, methods and tools are developed over the years to address this concern. In recent years, with the increasing numbers of students accessing the internet using mobile devices, there has been growing interest in embracing the mobile technology in teaching to improve the student participation in the classroom. This research describes the design and implementation of a mobile-based interactive teaching model with in-class and off-class components aided by Socrative online audience response system to improve students’ engagement in a private university in Malaysia. A total of 45 students from undergraduate computing course had participated in this experimental study. The activities such as polls, exercises, quizzes and games was used to stimulate the discussion and encourage two ways communication between instructor and students. Both qualitative and quantitative data comprises of students’ feedbacks, academic results, attendance records and instructor’s teaching evaluation scores are analyzed. The results show that students were strongly positive with the use of Socrative and felt that they were more engaged. This interactive model has successfully enhanced students’ learning experience and improved students’ academic performance. The outcome of this study would contributes to current evidence of the efficacy of using mobile technology in higher education teaching

Healthy Competition: Multiplayer Digital Games in Health Education

The focus of this dissertation is on the role of multiplayer digital games in adult education, with a particular emphasis on health education. Although interest in the use of digital games for serious applications has been increasing since the early 2000s, there is a significant gap in understanding on the use of multiplayer digital games in adult education. In the context of health education, there has been a large amount of research conducted in to the use of repurposed commercial games for predicting performance of trainees and health students on surgical simulators. However, beyond this niche research into game based learning is notably less cohesive. There has been some research into the use of digital games in areas such as for delivering insulin management training, but understanding of the processes for widespread application of games based learning in the health sector is limited. Additionally, almost no research has been undertaken into the use of multiplayer digital games in health education, whether it be for tertiary or adult learners. In this dissertation two digital games were developed, implemented and evaluated to explore the value of multiplayer games for supporting cooperation and collaboration in health education. The first game, They Know: Anatomy, was a real time team based strategy game designed to support anatomy revision by second year medical students. The second game, the Qstream: Cancer Cup Challenge, was a team based asynchronous online program designed to reinforce understanding of how to identify and manage adverse events by oncology registrars. A design research framework informed the methodology used in this dissertation. This framework emphasises the need to use multiple iteration cycles to develop a comprehensive understanding of player experiences with the digital games they encountered. Data on participant experiences with the digital games was collected using qualitative methods, including post-game surveys and semi-structured interviews. Between iterative cycles data on participant experiences with the digital games were analysed so that future implementations of the game could be modified to maximise cooperation and collaboration between players. At the conclusion of the study period data collected across all implementations of the digital games were analysed to increase understanding of how multiplayer digital games supported cooperation and collaboration between learners. Findings from this dissertation demonstrate that multiplayer digital games can be used to engage medical students in anatomy revision and medical oncologists in adverse events retraining. This is the first study to look at the use of digital games for either of these demographics. Additionally, this dissertation identified four ways through which multiplayer digital games foster collaboration between players: through the development of a team strategy to win the game, by facilitating !iii shared decision making, by working towards a shared goal, and by creating a sense of investment in a team. Finally, findings from this dissertation contribute to the literature on the implementation of game based learning in adult education. This is an under researched area, but one that warrants further focus in future if game based learning is going to be successfully incorporated into curricula and training activities for adult learners. This dissertation adds to the literature by presenting new knowledge on how and why multiplayer games support collaboration between learners. Additionally, it appears that multiplayer digital games offer diverse, flexible and immersive experiences to adult learners in a way that single player digital games may not. Finally, multiplayer digital games provide new avenues for support self-directed learning by encouraging cooperation between large groups of students in a manner that is not normally achieved in online learning environment