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Differences in Children's Affordance Awareness and Access Between Novice and Experienced Learners

Mon, April 16, 8:15 to 10:15am, Millennium Broadway New York Times Square, Floor: Sixth Floor, Room 6.01

Abstract

Purpose: Designers of educational applications consider many dimensions as they create their apps. Will the app be played for a few minutes or a few hours? How will the app help the player learn the educational concepts? Educators, too, must consider many dimensions when selecting apps for their students. Will the player have help nearby? Is the app for players first learning the content or for players who have already learned the content and need practice? This study addresses these latter questions for designers and educators. The purpose of the study is to examine the differences in affordance awareness and access in two groups of learners, novice and experienced, as they interacted with three virtual manipulative mathematics apps.

Theoretical framework: Affordances are “cues of the potential uses of an artefact by an agent in a given environment” and refer to possibilities that the agent has for action (Burlamaqui & Dong, 2014, p. 13). Moyer-Packenham and Westenskow (2016) identified motivation, simultaneous linking, focused constraint, efficient precision, and creative variation as affordance categories promoting learning. In this study, affordance awareness and access are classified according to these categories.

Methods: Fifty elementary school children interacted with three mathematics apps, where each app covered a different content area. Children completed four pretests, with three pretests corresponding to the apps and the fourth acting as a control. They then interacted with each app and answered interviewer questions pertaining to their awareness of affordances and connections with the mathematical content. Finally, the children completed four posttests.

Data sources: Data sources included pretests, which assessed initial content knowledge and allowed the researchers to classify the children as novice (≤50% correct) or experienced (>50% correct); and interviews and video recordings, which provided information about the children’s awareness and access to affordances, respectively.

Results: Researchers found that novice and experienced learners were aware of different affordances when playing the apps. In all three apps, novice learners attended to the motivating affordances. These children reacted positively to the literal bells and whistles included in the apps. In contrast, experienced learners did not always attend to the motivational affordances and when they did it was often in a negative fashion. Consequently, for the novice learners these motivational affordances were helpful, but for the experienced learners they were hindering. In one app, many experienced learners noticed a focused constraint affordance which gave a hint to find the correct answer. This hint was present for all children, but only a few novice learners were aware of the affordance without prompting by the interviewer. Thus, the learners in most need of the hint did not access the affordance.

Significance: App designers and educators must be aware of the differences in how an app is being used by novice and experienced learners. Novice learners may not attend to nuanced affordances intended to help them learn the content. Extra care should be taken in considering designing and selecting apps for these learners.

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