| dc.description.abstract | Peer assessment is a mechanism widely used for assessing students’ learning outcome, such as written assignments and oral reports. Some studies indicated that peer assessment brings many benefits to student learning, e.g., improving learning performance and strengthening the ability of problem solving. However, there is a lack of research to use peer assessment to support the design and evaluation of DGBL. On the other hand, DGBL is widespread in educational settings. A great amount of research indicated that DGBL can improve students’ learning outcomes, increase their learning motivation, etc. However, each individual has different background, needs and learning preferences so it is doubtful whether the design approaches used for the DGBL can be suitable to every learner. Thus, there is a need to consider human factors. Among various human factors, this study focuses on cognitive styles, which refer to the way of how learners process and organize information. Accordingly, cognitive styles may drive the design and evaluation of DGBL.
However, paucity of research examined the impacts of cognitive styles on the design and evaluation of DGBL of peer assessment. To fill this gap, this study examined the differences of design and evaluation among different cognitive style combinations. To achieve comprehensive understandings, this study addressed ten research questions, i.e., 1. How the combination of cognitive styles affects the scores that game designers obtain during the process of peer assessment, in terms of game elements? 2. How cognitive styles affects the scores that evaluators marks during the process of peer assessment, in terms of game elements? 3. How cognitive styles affects the scores that evaluators mark for each cognitive style combination, in terms of game elements? 4. How the combination of cognitive styles affects the scores that game designers obtain during the process of peer assessment, in terms of game proposals? 5. How cognitive styles affects the scores that evaluators marks during the process of peer assessment, in terms of game proposals? 6. How cognitive styles affect the scores that evaluators mark for each cognitive style combination, in terms of game proposals? 7. How the combination of cognitive styles affects the scores that game designers obtain during the process of peer assessment, in terms of game implementation? 8. How cognitive styles affects the score that evaluators mark during the process of peer assessment, in terms of game implementation? 9. How cognitive styles affect the scores that evaluators mark for each cognitive style combination, in terms of game implementation? 10. How the combination of cognitive styles affects the relationship between scores from game element and those from game interface design.
In order to answer the above questions, the subjects of this study play as both the roles of designers and evaluators. Regarding the role of designers, all members were divided into three groups according to their cogitative styles, i.e., field-independent & field- independent (FI&FI) 、field-independent & field-dependent (FI&FD) 、field-dependent & field- dependent (FD&FD). Regarding the role of evaluators, there are field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) evaluators. All members should go through three stage of this experiment. Stage one focus on the implementation of game elements while stage two and stage three emphasize on the improvement of user interface. More specifically, all members need to incorporate three game element, i.e., playfulness、novelty and functionality, into game design in stage one. All member should make a proposal for improving uses interface based on Nielsen heuristics in stage two and then make implementation according to what they propose in stage three.
The result of this study include scores that designers obtain and those that evaluators marks at each stage. Regarding the implementation of game elements, the scores that FI&FI obtained are higher than those of FD&FD, regardless of playfulness, novelty or functionality. On the other hand, the scores that FI mark for FI&FI and FD&FD are higher than those from FD, regardless of playfulness, novelty or functionality. Regarding the stage of the proposal of game interface, the scores that, the scores that FI&FI obtained are higher than those of FD&FD, including H1-H10. On the other hand, the scores that FI mark for FI&FI are higher than those from FD, in terms of H2, H3, H4, H5, H7, H8. Furthermore, the scores that FI mark for FD&FD are higher than those of FD, including H1-H10. Regarding the stage of the implementation of game interface, the scores that FI&FI obtained are higher than those of FD&FD, including H3-H9. On the other hand, the scores that FI mark for FI&FI are higher than those from FD, including H2-H8. Furthermore, the scores that FI mark for FD&FD are higher than those of FD, in terms of H3, H4, H6, H7, H8.
The above results provide the understandings of how different cognitive style combinations react to game elements and Nielsen’s ten heuristics during the process of game design and evaluation. In addition, evaluators with different cognitive styles also mark differently, regardless of game elements or game interface. In other words, cognitive styles play a key role. Such results can provide guidance for future researchers so that they how to undertake peer assessment from a cognitive style perspective.
Keywords: peer assessment, Digital Game Base Learning cognitive styles, Nielsen Heuristic.
| en_US |