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Background: Creating concept maps can help students overcome challenges of accurate knowledge monitoring and thus foster learning. However, students' knowledge often contains gaps and misconceptions, even after concept map creation. Theoretically, students could benefit from additional support, but it is unclear whether this might also be the case for (more practical-oriented) secondary vocational students. Objectives: This study investigated whether the effectiveness of concept maps for learning could be improved by providing students with expert examples and reflection prompts in addition to their self-generated concept maps. Methods: First-year secondary vocational students (N = 91, M[subscript age] = 17.3 years) participated in this study, which utilized a pretest-intervention-posttest design. Regarding the intervention, students worked in two successive online learning environments, in which they had to present their knowledge in concept maps. After creation, students' concept maps were, depending on condition, supplemented with (1) an expert example with comparative feedback (a combined concept map) and related reflection prompts, (2) the combined concept map only, or (3) no combined concept map and no prompts. Results and Conclusions: Analyses based on students' domain knowledge demonstrate that students significantly increased their knowledge in all conditions. Data indicate that there was no significant difference in knowledge gain between conditions. Further analysis showed that students in the experimental conditions demonstrated higher learning gains if they consulted the combined concept map more often than their peers. Implications: Access to an example in addition to students' self-generated concept maps seems promising in fostering their knowledge acquisition. However, secondary vocational students might need additional ways of support to guarantee higher learning gains. Avenues to increase the effectiveness of support are discussed.

The challenge in serious games is to improve the effectiveness of learning by stimulating relevant cognitive processes. In this paper, we investigate the potential of surprise in two experiments with prevocational students in the domain of proportional reasoning. Surprise involves an emotional reaction, but it also serves a cognitive goal as it directs attention to explain why the surprise occurred and can play a key role in learning. In our experiments, surprises were triggered by a surprising event, ie, a nonplaying character who suddenly appeared and changed characteristics of a problem. In Experiment 1-comparing a surprise condition with a control condition-we found no overall differences, but the results suggested that surprise may be beneficial for higher level students. In Experiment 2, we combined Expectancy strength (Strong vs. Weak) with Surprise (Present vs. Absent) using higher level students. We found a marginal overall effect of surprising events on learning indicating that students who experienced surprises learned more than students who were not exposed to these surprises but we found a stronger effect of surprise when we included existing proportional reasoning skill as factor. These results provide some evidence that a narrative technique as surprise can be used in game-based learning for the purpose of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]