Games and Simulation in Science
October 13th, 2009
Last week the National Academies Committee on Learning Science held a workshop on Computer Games, Simulations, and Education. As part of the workshop, papers were commissioned from some of the influential researchers in the field and they are available here.
The first paper by Douglas Clark and team does an excellent job reviewing the “state of [...]
Tags: games, simulation
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Simulations and Labs: Either/or?
October 6th, 2009
A lot of research into simulated environments sets them up in a “horse race” against hands-on laboratory activities in order to show that learning outcomes with simulations are at least as good as those from hands-on labs. But is it really an either/ or proposition?
Jaakkola & Nurmi (2007) looked at the possibilities of combining simulation [...]
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Open Source, E-Textbooks, Traditional Texts… oh my!
September 29th, 2009
What exactly are open source textbooks? How are they different than e-textbooks? How do both compare to traditional texts? The Education Commission for the States has a nice new report out that compares open source to e-textbooks, and looks at initiatives in states that are adopting either or both.
I’ve been a proponent of the [...]
Tags: open source, textbooks
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Failing at Ill-Structured Problems
September 9th, 2009
When is it good to let students fail? Is there something good that happens when students struggle and don’t succeed? These questions are explored by Kapur & Kinzur (2008) in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.
At a high level, they have groups of students randomly assigned to work on physics problems in triads on [...]
Tags: failure, ill-structured problems
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Motivation and Textbooks
July 31st, 2009
Who uses textbooks? Do students actually read the text? A study out in Teaching Educational Psychology by Derryberry & Wininger looked at the relationship between student motivation and textbook selection and use.
The authors combine a group of measures to create a group of “internal motivation” measures, including need for cognition (enjoying effortful thinking), mastery goal [...]
Tags: motivation, reading, textbooks
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- Games and Simulation in Science
- Simulations and Labs: Either/or?
- Open Source, E-Textbooks, Traditional Texts… oh my!
- Predicting eLearning Dropout
- Development of Help-Seeking
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