Enhancing Active Engagement in Learning
Effective didactic games should include the following four intrinsic motivational strategies:
Challenge
Learners get bored if the challenge is too easy to meet; at the same time, tasks that are too difficult make learners fail frequently, feel frustrated, and cease learning. Ideally, tasks should be designed so that there is an ongoing adjustment between the level of a task’s difficulty and the level of a learner’s developing skills.
Characteristics of activities that can provide a challenge to learners:
(1) the identification of proximal goals
(2) a guarantee of uncertain outcomes
(3) the presentation of frequent, clear, constructive, and encouraging feedback.
Curiosity
Curiosity can be stimulated by using technical events to attract the learners’ attention. Examples are animations, unpredictable or random events that may motivate learners to continue the learning process. In order to arouse cognitive curiosity, uncertain results, riddles, and various forms of feedback can be added to learning activities.
Control
Learners’ intrinsic motivation may be enhanced if activities can provide a sense of control and allow learners to direct their own learning performance.
Two suggestions for promoting a sense of control in computer-based instruction environments:
(1) allow learners to control instructionally irrelevant aspects of an activity (e.g., choice of characters’ name or sex; choice of
fantasies or music)
(2) provide limited choices concerning other variables (e.g., pace).
Three characteristics of a powerful environment promoting a sense of control are:
(1) contingency: make sure that learners’ results are dependent on their responses
(2) provide explicit and organized choices
(3) create environments in which students’ different actions have significant or salient effects. Learners’ intrinsic motivation
may be enhanced even by trivial or instructionally irrelevant choices.
Fantasy (contextualization)
A fantasy environment is an environment that evokes mental images of physical or social situations not actually present or in some cases not possible (Malone & Lepper, 1987). Many studies provide considerable evidence that fantasy environments can promote intrinsic motivation. Each of these four strategies (challenge, curiosity, control, and fantasy) can play a role in the instructional design of Web-LEs; they may complement each other in enhancing and sustaining students’ intrinsic motivation (Wang & Reeves, 2006, pg 172).
Effective didactic games should include the following four intrinsic motivational strategies:
Challenge
Learners get bored if the challenge is too easy to meet; at the same time, tasks that are too difficult make learners fail frequently, feel frustrated, and cease learning. Ideally, tasks should be designed so that there is an ongoing adjustment between the level of a task’s difficulty and the level of a learner’s developing skills.
Characteristics of activities that can provide a challenge to learners:
(1) the identification of proximal goals
(2) a guarantee of uncertain outcomes
(3) the presentation of frequent, clear, constructive, and encouraging feedback.
Curiosity
Curiosity can be stimulated by using technical events to attract the learners’ attention. Examples are animations, unpredictable or random events that may motivate learners to continue the learning process. In order to arouse cognitive curiosity, uncertain results, riddles, and various forms of feedback can be added to learning activities.
Control
Learners’ intrinsic motivation may be enhanced if activities can provide a sense of control and allow learners to direct their own learning performance.
Two suggestions for promoting a sense of control in computer-based instruction environments:
(1) allow learners to control instructionally irrelevant aspects of an activity (e.g., choice of characters’ name or sex; choice of
fantasies or music)
(2) provide limited choices concerning other variables (e.g., pace).
Three characteristics of a powerful environment promoting a sense of control are:
(1) contingency: make sure that learners’ results are dependent on their responses
(2) provide explicit and organized choices
(3) create environments in which students’ different actions have significant or salient effects. Learners’ intrinsic motivation
may be enhanced even by trivial or instructionally irrelevant choices.
Fantasy (contextualization)
A fantasy environment is an environment that evokes mental images of physical or social situations not actually present or in some cases not possible (Malone & Lepper, 1987). Many studies provide considerable evidence that fantasy environments can promote intrinsic motivation. Each of these four strategies (challenge, curiosity, control, and fantasy) can play a role in the instructional design of Web-LEs; they may complement each other in enhancing and sustaining students’ intrinsic motivation (Wang & Reeves, 2006, pg 172).