Adaptive games for education: performance and engagement in preschoolers

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Active learning—allowing learners to direct their own studies—is a key part of some educational theories and practices but is not well-understood in terms of its underlying mechanisms or effectiveness at different ages. Meanwhile, cognitive psychology studies have found that adults can benefit from being given self-direction in some types of tasks, and school-aged children can also benefit in simplified versions of these paradigms. Here I extend these past studies in two ways: studying younger children, whose metacognitive skills (which likely play a role in effective self-directed learning) are still developing, and using real-world stimuli for which children may have varying degrees of prior knowledge. In this multi-session study, I explore whether an active learning advantage can be found in preschoolers (ages 3-4) using a tablet game that teaches letter and number recognition over a week. I compare performance and engagement in two conditions: active learners are able to control time allocation between letter and number games that adapt to their level of knowledge; control learners follow a standard curriculum with no adaptive game dynamics. Despite the challenges presented by the adaptive curriculum, I find that active learners performed just as well as their peers who followed a standard curriculum.

Type of resource	text
Date created	2021

Author	Yi, Gloria
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Symbolic Systems Program
Primary advisor	Frank, Michael C.
Advisor	Kachergis, George

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/rh122qr6516

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Yi, Gloria. (2021). Adaptive games for education: performance and engagement in preschoolers. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/rh122qr6516

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University

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