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Metaphors are well-known tools for teaching statistics to novices. However, educators might overlook metaphor theoretical developments that offer nuanced and testable perspectives on their pedagogical applications. This article introduces the notion of metaphor types—“correspondence” (CO) and “class inclusion” (CI)—as different strategic ways of presenting metaphors and reports an experimental study on their effectiveness in teaching basic regression to language and communication majors. Briefly, CO emphasizes systematic links while CI emphasizes holistic perceptions of similarity between the source and target of a metaphor. Both competency and attitudinal measures were compared in view of the latter’s importance as intended outcomes of the typical introductory course. The results show that while CO outperformed CI in assessments of manual calculations (e.g., SST/SSR/SSE/R2), CI outperformed CO in essay assessments requiring elaboration of general conceptual understanding. CI was also linked to more positive perceptions of the practical utility of regression analysis and its contribution to personal growth. Correlations between performance and attitudes were stronger in CO than CI, which further suggests CO’s greater perceived resemblance to a “rote learning” approach. The attendant implications are discussed in the growing context of general statistics education for nonstatistics majors. Directions for further research are suggested.

The board game hobby has rapidly grown and evolved in recent years, but most of the non-digital games lack tips and tutorials and remain difficult to learn and teach effectively. In this project, we integrated a popular hobbyist approach to teaching modern strategy games with classical experiential learning elements (i.e., demonstration, observation, reflection, discussion and repeated experiences). We tested our model by teaching two modern board games to Japanese high school and university students. Questionnaires, gameplay data, self-ratings and discussions showed improved understanding and enjoyment, more strategic play and more interest in modern board games over the course of the instructional sequence. The model's repetition (the participants played each game three times) was rated the most useful in terms of learning the games. Overall, the integrated model was largely successful in teaching strategy board games to new players, and we offer several recommendations for teachers, designers and researchers of board games.

Emergent learning describes learning that occurs when participants interact and distribute knowledge, where learning is self-directed, and where the learning destination of the participants is largely unpredictable (Williams, Karousou, & Mackness, 2011). These notions of learning arise from the topologies of social networks and can be applied to the learning that occurs in educational institutions. However, the question remains whether institutional frameworks can accommodate the opposing notion of “cooperative systems” (Shirky, 2005), systems that facilitate the creation of user-generated content, particularly as first-year education cohorts are novice groups in the sense of not yet having developed university-level knowledge.This paper theorizes an emergent learning assessment item (Flickr photo-narratives) within a first-year media arts undergraduate education course. It challenges the conventional models of student–lecturer interaction by outlining a methodology of teaching for emergence that will facilitate student-directed and open-ended learning. The paper applies a matrix with four parameters (teacher-directed content/student-directed content; non-interactive learning task/interactive learning framework). This matrix is used as a conceptual space within which to investigate how a learning task might be constructed to afford the best opportunities for emergent learning. It explores the strategies that interactive artists utilize for participant engagement (particularly the relationship between the artist and the audience in the creation of interactive artworks) and suggests how these strategies might be applied to emergent generative outcomes with first-year education students.We build upon Williams et al.’s framework of emergent learning, where “content will not be delivered to learners but co-constructed with them” (De Freitas & Conole, as cited in Williams et al., 2011, p. 40), and the notion that in constructing emergent learning environments “considerable effort is required to ensure an effective balance between openness and constraint” (Williams et al., 2011, p. 39). We assert that for a learning event within a Web 2.0 environment to be considered emergent, not only does there need to be an effective balance between teacher-directed content and student-directed content for knowledge to be open, creative, and distributed by learners (Williams et al., 2011), but there also need to be multiple opportunities for interaction and communication between students within the system and that these “drive the emergence of structures that are more complex than the mere parts of that system” (Sommerer & Mignonneau, 2002, p. 161).