Interest-driven creator theory: towards a theory of learning design for Asia in the twenty-first century

Asian education is known for its examination-driven orientation, with the downsides of distorting the processes of learning and teaching, diminishing students’ interest in learning, and failing to nurture twenty-first century competencies among students. As a group of Asian researchers, we have been developing Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) Theory, a design theory based on three anchored concepts, namely interest, creation, and habit. Each of these anchored concepts is represented by a loop composed of three components. In the interest loop, the three components are triggering, immersing, and extending. The components of the creation loop are imitating, combining, and staging. The habit loop consists of cuing environment, routine, and harmony. These three loops are interconnected in various ways, with their characteristics revealed by the design process. We hypothesize that technology-supported learning activities that are designed with reference to IDC Theory will enable students to develop interest in learning, be immersed in the creation process, and, by repeating this process in their daily routines, strengthen habits of creation. Furthermore, students will excel in learning performance, develop twenty-first century competencies, and become lifelong interest-driven creators. To sharpen our understanding and further the development of the theory, we need more discussion and collaborative efforts in the community. Hypotheses arising from this theory can be tested, revised, or refined by setting up and investigating IDC Theory-based experimental sites. By disseminating the framework, foundations, and practices to the various countries and regions of Asia, we hope that it will bring about compelling examples and hence a form of quality education for the twenty-first century, which is an alternative to the examination-driven education system. In this paper, we present an overall introduction to IDC Theory and its history, and discuss some of the steps for advancing it in the future

IDC theory: habit and the habit loop

Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is a design theory that intends to inform the design of future education in Asia. It consists of three anchored concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. This paper presents the third anchored concept habit as well as the habit loop. IDC theory assumes that learners, when driven by interest, can be engaged in knowledge creation. Furthermore, by repeating such process in their daily learning routines, learners will form interest-driven creation habits. The habit loop, the process of building such a habit, consists of three component concepts— cuing environment, routine, and harmony. The cuing environment is a habit trigger that tells the students’ brain to get prepared and go into an automatic mode, letting learning behavior unfold. Routine refers to the behavioral patterns the students repeat most often, literally etched into their neural pathways. Harmony refers to the affective outcome of the routine activity as well as the integration or stabilization of habits; that is, through the routine behavior and action, students may feel that their needs get fulfilled, feel satisfied, and experience inner peace. It is our hope that such habitual behavior of creating knowledge can be sustained so long that students ultimately become lifelong interest-driven creators. This paper focuses on the description of the three components of the habit loop and discusses how these components are related to the interest loop and the creation loop in supporting learners in developing their interest-driven creation capability

iAbstract: Game-driven Keyword Auction and Summarization for Academic Reading

[[abstract]]Graduate students usually lack sufficient ability to read academic papers effectively and efficiently. For facilitating their reading comprehension, this study adopts summarization as a main reading strategy under the scaffold of keyword evaluation. Furthermore, this study attempts to transform summarization into a group-based educational game by incorporating keyword auction mechanisms. The research purpose is to investigate how first-year graduate students react to such an educational game when they are required to summarize a section of a real journal paper. The results indicate that they improve the completeness of the summaries without decreasing their conciseness after the game. Besides, the analysis of their prior summaries suggests that graduate students may lack the ability of structure analysis, idea integration and argumentation. Additionally, the results also show that there are positive relationships among the students’ evaluation, experts’ evaluation, auction behaviors and frequencies in summaries of the keywords, suggesting that students’ keyword evaluation may change their decision-making behaviors and the quality of their final summaries

Unfolding Learning Behaviors: A Sequential Analysis Approach in A Game-based Learning Environment

[[abstract]]During the past two decades, conducting game-based learning research poses several predicaments. In particular, two primary challenges have been raised: the lack of long-term intervention in a real world and the lack of the revelation of learning process for understanding students’ engagement. Hence, in order to overcome the two challenges gradually, a previous study developed a game-based learning environment, entitled My-Pet-My-Quest (MPMQ), for arithmetic practices. The MPMQ provides pet-keeping tasks and learning tasks, so that students can play the role of pet-keepers who can interact with their virtual pets and solve a series of small quests that sustain students’ motivation and engagement. For understanding students’ behaviors in the environment, two processes were carried out. This study first attempted to implement long-term intervention in an elementary afterschool club as well as students’ home, and then to analyze the learning process. Furthermore, this study adopted a sequential analysis approach, based on a designing framework, to help us examine and understand the each aspect of behaviors in students’ learning and playing. These results can provide suggestions and references for the design of efficient game-based learning environments in the future

iAbstract: Game-driven Keyword Auction and Summarization for Academic Reading

Graduate students usually lack sufficient ability to read academic papers effectively and efficiently. For facilitating their reading comprehension, this study adopts summarization as a main reading strategy under the scaffold of keyword evaluation. Furthermore, this study attempts to transform summarization into a group-based educational game by incorporating keyword auction mechanisms. The research purpose is to investigate how first-year graduate students react to such an educational game when they are required to summarize a section of a real journal paper. The results indicate that they improve the completeness of the summaries without decreasing their conciseness after the game. Besides, the analysis of their prior summaries suggests that graduate students may lack the ability of structure analysis, idea integration and argumentation. Additionally, the results also show that there are positive relationships among the students’ evaluation, experts’ evaluation, auction behaviors and frequencies in summaries of the keywords, suggesting that students’ keyword evaluation may change their decision-making behaviors and the quality of their final summaries

Effects of Friendship Relations and Gender Differences on Classroom-based Surrogate Competitive Learning

[[abstract]]Competition has been recently come to be recognized as a significant factor in the design of strategies for classroom-based learning. However, although the influences of cognitive factors (e.g., ability) and interpersonal factors (i.e., anonymity) on surrogate competitive learning have been investigated, there have been few studies emphasizing the impact of social factors (e.g., friendship) in the classroom. In addition, previous studies have also suggested that gender differences should be taken into account in surrogate competitive learning. Thus, this study investigates how both friendship relations and gender differences influence students’ choice of peers as opponents in the classroom environment. An empirical study with 29 elementary students over a 4-month period was conducted. The results indicated that students tended to choose peers with whom they did not share friendship relations as opponents. Specifically, boys tended to choose from either category, whereas girls liked to choose those without friendship relations. In addition, most students tended to choose same-gender peers. Moreover, if choosing same-gender classmates, boys tended to choose opponents with whom they shared friendship relations, whereas girls tended to choose opponents without friendship relations. In short, both friendship relations and gender differences can serve as predictors for student participation in classroom-based surrogate competitive learning

Supporting parental engagement in a BYOD (bring your own device) school

[[abstract]]This study developed a platform, entitled Parent–Teacher-Ark, to support parental engagement in their children’s education, and investigated parents’ online behaviors and perceptions in the platform. This platform consisted of the home–school communication bulletin, the parent–teacher forum, the online parental learning courses (OPC), and the multiple e-Portfolio (MeP) in order to explore the potential of digital technology for helping parents and teachers co-work more closely. This study was conducted in a digital school, in which more than 90% of parents prepared tablet PCs for their children. There were 653 parents of the first to third graders participating this study, which aimed to investigate parents’ using behaviors, perception and thoughts by system records, questionnaires, and interviews. The results indicated that the participations of the parents gradually increased and they had positive perceptions toward OPC, and MeP (in particular, learning traffic signals and visualized learning profile). The results suggested that most parents thought that the Parent–Teacher-Ark platform may help them increase their educational knowledge and understand children’s learning

Equal opportunity tactic: Redesigning and applying competition games in classrooms

[[abstract]]Competition, despite its potential drawbacks, is an easily adopted and frequently used motivator in classrooms. Individual abilities, in the years of schooling, are inevitably different, and performance in competition is heavily ability dependent, resulting that more-able students always win while less-able students always lose. Students easily perceive how well they perform through the result of competition, which is termed as perceived performance in this paper. Consistently demonstrating lower perceived performance than their peers, the less-able students feel discouraged and frustrated, hardly having the same opportunity for owning the sense of achievement as the more-able students. In this study, the authors designed a computerized mechanism, equal opportunity tactic, to lessen the difference in perceived performance between more-able and less-able students. Equal opportunity tactic is incorporated into a version of a competitive learning game called AnswerMatching, in which every student is assigned an opponent with similar ability. An experiment was also conducted to preliminarily investigate the effectiveness and effects of the tactic. Results showed that equal opportunity tactic could reduce the effect of individual ability difference on the perceived performance as well as the belief about how well students could achieve. In other words, less-able students could have similar opportunity of success and build confidence similar to more-able students in a competition

Automatic Classification with SVM and F-VSM on Elementary Chinese Composition

[[abstract]]Currently, automated evaluation of Chinese composition still has limitations. Moreover, the human evaluation is possible subjective, time-consuming and laborious. Hence, to develop automatic evaluation of Chinese composition is very meaningful and potential. In this study, we adopted two methods: support vector machine (SVM) and feature vector space model (F-VSM) to evaluate 4193 Chinese compositions collected from 1st to 6th grade at an elementary school in Wuhan. This study integrated natural language processing techniques to extract features, and uses SVM and F-VSM to classify the composition level. We investigated 45 linguistic features and divided into four aspects: text structure, syntactic complexity, word complexity and lexical diversity. The result indicated that both SVM and F-VSM have good classification effect, and F-VSM effect is better than SVM