Players get more points for choosing correct answers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Learners need to respond through activities such as reflective writing, taking a quick quiz, and brainstorm with others. Do these mirror what the learner knows? One effective way an instructor can help with learners is give correct answers to a quiz along with explanations why each answer is as it is. Most ineffective, as I find, is per answer is correct or not; not one learner appreciates why an answer, by itself, is correct or not. From a video game, I can see that a player receives more points for correct answers; at the same time, however, the game motivates learning–or does it? The theoretical reason is, “Reflection promotes essential and generative processing by encouraging more active organization and integration of new information” (Moreno & Meyer, 2007). The yes-no feedback would be a corrective response, which, as just stated is not desirable. Instead, “Explanatory feedback reduces extraneous processing by providing students with proper schemas to repair their misconceptions” (Moreno & Meyer, 2007).
I noticed the mention by Moreno and Myer (2007), that of the reflection principle, a guided activity for learners to show on correct answers during the process of meaning making; it induces a dialogue between learners and the instructor (as cited in Azevedo, 2005; Jacobson et al. 1996).
One prominent site I can relate with is BrainPop (2012). Following their animation presentation, they offer a quiz on the sequence of activities in how they produce their animations. If learners wish, they can see the answers and write about something reflective to prove that they learned about BranPop’s production cycle. Alongside those, BrainPop provided related topics. In any case, the learner never leaves the site without interacting with the site.
I believe that the site best fostered learning for the video, which I saw. The site used this model to demonstrate effectiveness of their instruction. Viewers, such as instructors, liking this can become a member and ensure that every computer for the class uses the site for the sake of learning through the method of instruction. Accolades for the website are in order!
References
Azevedo, R. (2005). Computer environments as metacognitive tools for enhancing learning. Educational Psychologist, 40, 193–197.
BrainPop. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.brainpop.com/technology/computersandinternet/
digitalanimation/
Jacobson, M. J., Maouri, C., Mishra, P., & Kolar, C. (1996). Learning with hypertext learning environments: Theory, design, and research. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 5, 239–281.
Moreno, R., & Mayer, R. (2007). Interactive multimodal learning environments. Educational Psychology Review, 19(3), 309–326.
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