Mathematics is closely related to daily life, but it is also one of the lessons which often cause anxiety to primary school students. Digital game-based learning (DGBL) has been regarded as a sound learning strategy in raising learner willingness and interest in many disciplines. Thus, ways of designing a DGBL system to mitigate anxiety are well…

Complex Problem Solving (CPS) skills are essential to successfully deal with environments that change dynamically and involve a large number of interconnected and partially unknown causal influences. The increasing importance of such skills in the 21st century requires appropriate assessment and intervention methods, which in turn rely on adequate…

Today, much problem solving is performed by teams, rather than individuals. The complexity of these problems has exceeded the cognitive capacity of any individual and requires a team of members to solve them. The success of solving these complex problems not only relies on individual team members who possess different but complementary expertise,…

The important but little understood problem that motivated this study was the lack of research on valid assessment methods to determine progress in higher-order learning in situations involving complex and ill-structured problems. Without a valid assessment method, little progress can occur in instructional design research with regard to designing…

Educational Badges are touted as an alternative assessment that can increase learner motivation. We considered two distinct models for educational badges; merit badges and videogame achievements. To begin unpacking the relationship between badges and motivation, we conducted a study using badges within an intelligent-tutor system for teaching…

In this article, the authors argue that educational technology is chiefly and increasingly being used as a tool for the privatization of education and the commodification of people by way of top down evaluative structures put in place by governments in collusion with neoliberal interests. This analysis began as a study that sought to illuminate…

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of technologies that use natural language as the basis for concept map construction. In particular, this study focuses on the semantic relation (SR) approach to drawing rich and authentic concept maps that reflect students' internal representations of a problem situation. The…

This study examined some of the methodological approaches used by students to construct causal maps in order to determine which approaches help students understand the underlying causes and causal mechanisms in a complex system. This study tested the relationship between causal understanding (ratio of root causes correctly/incorrectly identified,…

Prior research suggests that exposure to conflict can negatively impact the development of executive functioning, which in turn can affect academic performance. Recognizing the need to better understand the potentially widespread executive function deficiencies among Palestinian students and to help develop educational resources targeted to youth…

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a content analysis model for assessing students' cognitive learning in asynchronous online discussions. It adopted a fully mixed methods design, in which qualitative and quantitative methods were employed sequentially for data analysis and interpretation. Specifically, the design was a…

The effectiveness of serious games is often measured with verbal assessment. As an alternative we propose Pathfinder structural assessment (defined as measuring the learners' knowledge organization and compare this with a referent structure) which comprises three steps: knowledge elicitation, knowledge representation and knowledge evaluation. We…

Effective and efficient measurement of the development of skill and knowledge, especially in domains of human activity that involve complex and challenging problems, is important with regard to workplace and academic performance. However, there has been little progress in the area of practical measurement and assessment, due in part to the lack of…

This paper explores the design of a Web-based tutorial for Activity Analysis offered within an undergraduate course of occupational therapy and how its design features influenced meaningful learning from the students' perspective. This tutorial, using a case-based format, offers a learner-directed approach to students and the application of…

Recent research has touted the benefits of learner-centered instruction, problem-based learning, and a focus on complex learning. Instructors often struggle to put these goals into practice as well as to measure the effectiveness of these new teaching strategies in terms of mastery of course objectives. Enter the course evaluation, often a…

Meaningful learning requires deep engagement with ideas. Deep engagement is supported by the critical thinking skill of argumentation. Learning to argue represents an important way of thinking that facilitates conceptual change and is essential for problem solving. In order to appropriately apply argumentation practices to learning, we first…