Hercy N. H. Cheng

Equal opportunity tactic: Redesigning and applying competition games in classrooms

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.

Number Jigsaw Puzzle: A Mathematical Puzzle Game for Facilitating Players' Problem-Solving Strategies

Puzzles can be regarded as problem-solving games, in which players have to solve the obstacle they confront. Solving puzzles helps players to foster logical thinking and to facilitate problem-solving strategies. In this paper, we base on four puzzle games, magic square, jigsaw puzzle, sudoku, and kakuro, and then we design a number puzzle game, called number jigsaw puzzle (NJP). In solving NJP, players could construct their problem-solving strategies according to their previous knowledge. A pilot study was conducted to investigate what strategies the players would use in solving NJP. The result shows that the five different strategies had been found in the pilot study.

Unfolding online learning behavioral patterns and their temporal changes of college students in SPOCs

ABSTRACT The emergence of massive open online courses not only changes the ecology of higher education, but also facilitates a blending learning paradigm, also known as small private online courses (SPOCs). In order to understand how college students interact with an SPOC platform, this study collects their online behaviors for a semester and adopts a lag sequential analysis approach to identify significant transitions between interactions with content, peers, and instructors. Regarding content, after entering courses, the students tend to access learning resources. Besides, the transitions between learning resources and personal performance are significantly interconnected to each other. Regarding peers, the interaction with classmates was mainly connected to the access of assignments and performance. Regarding instructors, the interaction with teachers was minor but connected to all other behaviors. In addition, the results also show that students’ online behavioral patterns in SPOCs may change over time. The implications of the findings for SPOCs research are discussed in this paper.

MatrixDesks: interactive computing desks toward one-on-two educational computing environments

The era of 1:1 educational computing environment where each student has one mobile computing device is not far away. When such technology designed for individuals is applied to group learning, several student grouping problems could be encountered. In this paper, three issues are identified to illustrate the vision of the 1:2 educational computing environments. In a 1:2 classroom, besides the mobile devices, students also have their own computing desks, i.e. MatrixDesks, to solve the potential student grouping problems. By putting MatrixDesks together, a small group can form a shared working space with the combined desktops immediately and they can use their own digital pens as the input devices to work on and talk over it. Meanwhile, the students use their mobile devices to handle the related individual tasks. MatrixDesks is a coordination of applying the mobile computing and invisible computing to collaborative learning, which will lead to the accomplishment of 1:2 educational computing environments.

Using Feedback to Improve Learning: Differentiating between Correct and Erroneous Examples

Research indicates that the combination of correct and erroneous examples has a positive effect on knowledge acquisition and transfer if learners have adequate prior knowledge. If only erroneous examples were provided, students with low prior knowledge may need additional supports so that their procedural skills can be effectively promoted. For this reason, this study, taking subtraction as the learning domain, conducted a 2 × 2 factorial design of quasi-experiment varying in example types (correct vs. erroneous examples) and feedback settings (with vs. without feedback). Results indicated that feedback may promote transfer and retention in learning from worked-out examples. However, there was no significant difference between correct and erroneous examples in helping students learn subtraction procedures. According to the results of our questionnaire on cognitive load, it was likely caused by the complexity of the organization and presentation of erroneous examples. We suggest that clear and intelligible presentation can be supported by computer technologies.

Preparation-before-Competition: Designing a Game-Based Environment to Facilitate Making Effort before Pet-Competitive Stage

Although competitive games have multi-fold benefits to students’ learning, such as motivation, satisfaction, and effectiveness, inappropriate competitive learning activities may have some negative impacts on students. From the literature, the authors have identified three main strategies which may reduce the negative impacts in competition game. However, because these strategies target only at the design of competition, the learning effects is limited. In fact, learning also happens in the preparation before competition. Hence, this study adopts preparation-before-competition approach to foster the habit of endeavor. That is, students make more effort to learn; they will win more easily. An animal companion system, entitled My-Pet-Trainer system, was implemented according to such approach. The system encourages students to improve their learning in the preparation stage where the virtual pets represent students’ open learner models before the competition stage. In addition, the paper also considers the symbiosis and emotional relationship with virtual pets to maintain long-term interactions.

Evaluating Children's Composition Based on Chinese Linguistic Features with Machine Learning

The traditional evaluation of composition is human evaluation which is time-consuming, laborious and easily affected by subjective. In recent years, the automatic essay scoring (AES) has become a hot issue in natural language processing, but few research focus on Chinese AES. Hence, this study designed a Chinese AES system and collected 4566 compositions from first grade to sixth grade students. We also extracted 43 linguistic features based on Chinese characteristic, and analysis these compositions based on three model by stepwise multiple regression technique and support vector machine. Results showed that the accuracy of classification is among 70~80%.

Applying Auction Mechanisms to Designing a Chinese Reading Games for Keyword Selection and Summary Writing

Summarization may facilitate students to understand articles deeply by constructing gist, while keywords may scaffold students to reorganize the gist when summarizing articles. For this reason, this study adopts keywords to scaffold students to write summaries. Furthermore, this study also attempts to transform summarization into a group-based educational game by incorporating auction mechanisms in order to facilitate students motivation. This paper reports a case study for exploring the feasibility of three auction mechanisms, i.e. fixed prices, open bidding and secret bidding. The results shows how eight graduate students choose and bid for keywords, as well as use keywords in their summaries. The results also show their most and least favorite auction mechanisms as well as their reasons.

Integrating Clustering and Sequential Analysis to Explore Students' Behaviors in an Online Chinese Reading Assessment System

It is helpful for students and teachers to identify students reading abilities and testing strategies based on their behavioral records of reading tests in an online Chinese reading assessment system. In this study, a K-means clustering algorithm is used to divide students into three potential clusters, and the behavioral sequence diagram of each cluster is drawn by means of the lag sequential analysis. By comparing the characteristics and differences of clusters, this paper draws the following main conclusions: (1) For better reading performance, increasing the time of reading articles is more beneficial than directly searching for the answers in the articles according to questions and options; (2) Students with high reading abilities spend longer time on reading articles and inspecting items, but rarely alter options; (3) Students with low reading abilities, who spend longer testing time and have more behaviors of clicking on articles and items, are not focused enough on current questions; (4) Those students with low reading abilities, who spend shorter testing time, rarely have inspection behaviors. Finally, this paper puts forward some suggestions based on the reading ability and testing strategy of each cluster to improve students reading literacy and instruct teachers reading teaching activities.

Applying Item Response Theory to Analyzing and Improving the Item Quality of an Online Chinese Reading Assessment

In order to realize the individualized teaching of Chinese language in primary schools, this research has developed an online Chinese reading assessment for primary schools, which aims to record the students test process and analyze the development level of students Chinese reading ability. In this paper, the item response theory (IRT) is applied to the quality analysis of the assessment in terms of measurement attributes (difficulty, discrimination, guessing), item characteristic curve, item information function and test information function. Additionally, this paper further explores the relationship between the various parameters of the items. The results show that the IRT can effectively guide the construction of the reading assessment scale, improve the discrimination degree, reduce the guessing degree, and effectively improve the quality of the item. This paper also proposes a method to find out the unreasonable options and modify items locally through project parameters and option analysis. It is expected that researchers and educators can modify the item more efficiently by quality analysis.