Examining the Effect of Self-Explanation and Explanatory Feedback on a Cognitively Demanding Educational Physics Game

• In Event: Designing and Implementing Educational Games: Exploring How to Increase the Effectiveness of Games for Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine when self-explanation prompts are ineffective in increasing learning outcomes with an educational game. In order to promote understanding students must be encouraged to process information at a deeper, generative level instead only engaging in shallow processing typically indicative of route memorization (Mayer, 2009). This can be problematic with educational games because students may understand the mechanics of the game without understanding the connection with the educational material underlying those mechanics. A review of self-explanation research by Roy and Chi (2005) found that it is an effective learning tool for multimedia environments to encourage deeper understanding. For a game on electronic circuits, Mayer and Johnson (2010) found higher learning gains when they included self-explanation prompts, explanatory feedback, or a combination of the two. This experiment explored whether adding explanatory feedback or self-explanation prompts increased learning in an educational game on Newton’s 3 laws of motion.

During the experiment 100 students played three different versions of the educational game Epigame: 27 in the explanatory feedback condition, 31 in the self-explanation question condition, and 27 in the no feedback/no questions condition. Students played through 35 possible levels of the game with the levels slowly adding elements from the three laws as gameplay progressed. .

The results showed that there was an overall effect of test session with students showing higher overall performance on the posttest however there was no significant interaction with condition. When the questions were broken down according to which law they addressed there was a significant effect of condition for questions dealing with the 2nd law of motion, F(2,80) = 3.19, MSE = 7.38, p = .05, with participants in the no feedback/ no questions group scoring significantly higher than the questions group (p = .04, d =.70). This finding is not surprising considering when looking at game progression there was also a significant effect of condition, F(2,83) = 4.18, MSE = 107.48, p = .02, with participants in the no feedback/no questions group completing significantly more levels than the questions condition. There was also a non-significant trend for participants in the feedback group to complete more levels than the questions group, (p = .07).

One possible reason that students in the questions group did not progress as far is that the questions discouraged them from trial and error attempts when solving the game levels. Many of the game levels could require up to 40 actions to solve placing a large large amount of cognitive load on working memory. Students could have alleviated this load by breaking the levels into smaller segments and testing out those segments. Students in the questions group may have been discourages from doing this since they would have to answer two questions for each trial. This research suggests that when an educational game overloads working memory, self-explanation will not be effective at increasing learning gains.

Authors

• Deanne Marie Adams, University of Notre Dame

• Douglas Clark, Vanderbilt University