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This study describes the use of a game-based writing environment (GWE) to increase textual cohesion in students' writing and improve their writing attitude. The participants were 113 third-grade students in Taiwan; the study was conducted over two semesters. A GWE was used for the experimental group (n = 56), and a conventional writing environment was used for the control group (n = 57). Both environments were constructed using the Reading for Creating and Talking for Revising writing model, which has helped students overcome writing difficulties. The GWE provided management-related game elements and a game-based feedback mechanism in the form of peer response and created a setting in which students could engage in more writing activity, pay more attention to their writing, and improve their writing skills. The results indicated that the experimental group performed better than the control group in referential cohesion and in terms of their affective, challenge, and qualified attitudes. We speculate that the GWE strengthens students' textual cohesion and writing attitude.

Numerous studies have shown that learning is enhanced when students show interest in the subject matter. However, educators continue to grapple with the challenges, or simply do not recognize their potential roles, in the development of students' academic interest and interest in learning in general. This conceptual paper is written under the auspices of the interest-driven creator (IDC) initiative, a theoretical synthesis effort carried out by a group of educational researchers in Asia. The intention is to co-construct a holistic developmental/design framework to guide the students in fostering their learning interests, capabilities in creation, and learning habits--the three anchored concepts of IDC theory. This paper focuses on delineating a three-component "interest loop" to guide the design of a coherent learning process that encompasses a series of learning tasks. The three components are triggering interest, immersing interest, and extending interest. Underpinned by the rich literature on interest development, we will propose suitable design strategies for each of the three components, namely, curiosity, flow, and meaningfulness, respectively. We will then explicate their respective design considerations/principles to maximize the intended effects.

Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is a design theory that intends to inform the design of future education in Asia. It consists of three anchored concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. This paper presents the third anchored concept habit as well as the habit loop. IDC theory assumes that learners, when driven by interest, can be engaged in knowledge creation. Furthermore, by repeating such process in their daily learning routines, learners will form interest-driven creation habits. The habit loop, the process of building such a habit, consists of three component concepts--cuing environment, routine, and harmony. The cuing environment is a habit trigger that tells the students' brain to get prepared and go into an automatic mode, letting a learning behavior unfold. Routine refers to the behavioral patterns the students repeat most often, literally etched into their neural pathways. Harmony refers to the affective outcome of the routine activity as well as the integration or stabilization of habits; that is, through the routine behavior and action, students may feel that their needs get fulfilled, feel satisfied, and experience inner peace. It is our hope that such habitual behavior of creating knowledge can be sustained so long that students ultimately become lifelong interest-driven creators. This paper focuses on the description of the three components of the habit loop and discusses how these components are related to the interest loop and the creation loop in supporting learners in developing their interest-driven creation capability.

In traditional mathematics education, students have typically been asked to solve lots of tedious and uninteresting exercises for developing the arithmetic skills of addition and subtraction. The paper provides an account of learning arithmetic skills in a more interesting way through the collaborative playing of a puzzle game. 83 students in three classes in Grade 4 were asked to solve arithmetic problems with three different methods: via playing an adapted "cross number puzzle" game on Group Scribbles (GS) collaboratively, via playing the same game on GS individually, and via the traditional method of teaching and learning, i.e. with no games at all. Analysis of the pre and post learning achievement data reveals that the two classes who played the game performed better than the control class, with the collaborative class students achieving better than the individual class students. By playing the game, low-ability students, in particular, made the most significant progress in arithmetic capability and in building up their confidence in doing arithmetic calculations. (Contains 14 tables and 11 figures.)

The interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is being developed as a group endeavor by Asian researchers to articulate a holistic learning design theory for future education in Asia. The theory hypothesizes that students, driven by "interest", can be engaged in the "creation" of knowledge (generating ideas and artifacts). By repeating this creation process in their daily learning routines, they will excel in learning performance, develop twenty-first-century competencies, and form creation "habits". We hope that with such practices in education, our future generations will ultimately become lifelong interest-driven creators. In IDC Theory, there are three "anchored" concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. Each anchored concept comprises three "component" concepts which form a "concept loop". For example, the creation loop consists of three component concepts--"imitating", "combining", and "staging". Imitating is concerned with taking in (or inputting) an abundant amount of existing knowledge from the outside world to form one's background knowledge. Combining refers to delivering (or outputting) new ideas or artifacts prolifically by synthesizing existing information encountered in the world and thoughts arising from the students' background knowledge. Staging relates to frequently demonstrating the generated ideas or artifacts to the relevant communities and receiving feedback from these communities to improve the novelty and value of the demonstrated outcomes while gaining social recognition and nurturing positive social emotions. This paper focuses on describing the three components of the creation loop. We provide three case studies to illustrate the creation loop at work, as well as how it intertwines with both the interest and habit loops in supporting students to develop their creation capabilities. In presenting this iteration of the creation concept, an anchored concept in IDC theory, we acknowledge the roles played of imitation, combination, and staging in different learning and education contexts--indeed, there are multiple theories that inform and intersect with it.

Conventional teacher-led instruction remains dominant in most elementary mathematics classrooms in Taiwan. Under such instruction, the teacher can rarely take care of all students. Many students may then continue to fall behind the standard of mathematics achievement and lose their interest in mathematics; they eventually give up on learning mathematics. In fact, students in Taiwan generally have lower interest in learning mathematics compared to many other regions/countries. Thus, how to enhance students' mathematics achievement and interest are two major problems, especially for those low-achieving students. This paper describes how we designed a game-based learning environment, called "Math-Island," by incorporating the mechanisms of a construction management game into the knowledge map of the elementary mathematics curriculum. We also report an experiment conducted with 215 elementary students for 2 years, from grade 2 to grade 3. In this experiment, in addition to teacher-led instruction in the classroom, students were directed to learn with Math-Island by using their own tablets at school and at home. As a result of this experiment, we found that there is an increase in students' mathematics achievement, especially in the calculation and word problems. Moreover, the achievements of low-achieving students in the experimental school outperformed the low-achieving students in the control school (a control group in another school) in word problems. Moreover, both the low-achieving students and the high-achieving students in the experimental school maintained a rather high level of interest in mathematics and in the system.

We have observed that many computer-supported writing environments based on pedagogical strategies have only been designed to incorporate the cognitive aspects, but motivational aspects should also be included. Hence, we theorize that integrating game-based learning into the writing environment may be a practical approach that can facilitate student participation, not only helping students learn how to write, but also sustaining their willingness to write. In this study, we investigate the effects of the game-based writing environment on improving students' participation, performance, and interest in writing. An experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of 2 approaches to writing in language arts at an elementary school. Two hundred forty-five third grade students participated in the experiment over a period of 1 year. One hundred thirty-nine students were assigned to an experimental group and learned with a game-based writing environment, and 106 students were in the contrast group and learned with an online writing environment. The empirical results show that the game-based writing environment can effectively promote students' writing participation, writing performance, interest in writing, as well as their perceptions of the use of educational self-management games. Some implications of the experimental results are also discussed.

One-to-one technology, which allows every student to receive equal access to learning tasks through a personal computing device, has shown increasing potential for self-directed learning in elementary schools. With computer-supported self-directed learning (CS-SDL), students may set their own learning goals through the suggestions of the system based on their e-portfolio and strive for the goals with efforts and mathematics capability. However, unlike adults who hold specific purposes that lead to enhanced motivation for SDL, children's motivation is crucial for learning individually. Therefore, this study examines the differences in motivational orientation and learning strategies between second graders with different intensities of intrinsic and extrinsic goals. The results indicate that students with high intensity of both intrinsic and extrinsic goals demonstrate significantly higher motivational orientation and learning strategies than those with low intensity of goals. These results provide supportive evidence for the design of CS-SDL at the elementary level and offer a reference for exploring children's motivational differences in CS-SDL.

This study explored the behavior of students who used a book recommendation system, specifically the My-Bookstore system, over a five semester period. This study addressed two main research questions, the first being related to "the most frequent behaviors and behavioral patterns." The results showed that "visiting" behavior and "book recommendation" behavior were the two most frequent behaviors in the first and last semesters. In addition, there was a tendency for the recommendation behavior to increase over the five semesters, implying that the My-Bookstore system can facilitate the book recommendation behavior. The second research question concerned the influences of "incentive models on the recommendation behavior." The findings demonstrated that the coin reward incentive in the game has a short-term impact on student recommendation behavior. However, those functions that have an internally tightly-coupled relevance to book recommendation (e.g., "choosing recommended books" as a store management incentive, and "checking histories" a social interaction incentive) act to give the My-Bookstore program better long-term effects on the students' book recommendation.

Research indicates that learning from erroneous examples (EE) is superior to correct examples because errors may provide students with a stimulus to spontaneously produce more self-explanations, leading to better learning outcomes. However, because most studies were conducted in individual settings, it remains an open question whether the advantage of EE could be reproduced in collaborative settings. Therefore, this study used a 2 × 2 factorial design varying in example types (correct vs. erroneous examples) and learning settings (individuals vs. collaboration). An experimental study of a 2-week course on subtraction for third grade students was conducted (N = 109). Results indicated that collaborative learning may enhance the transfer knowledge of subtraction. The improvements were still maintained over 2 weeks. In addition, collaboration also facilitated students' confidence in handling errors. However, there was no significant difference in promoting isomorphic and transfer knowledge between learning from correct and erroneous examples. Additionally, this study also explored the absence of the intended benefit of erroneous examples from a cognitive load perspective.

"Reciprocal tutoring," as reported in "Exploring the design of computer supports for reciprocal tutoring" (Chan and Chou 1997), has extended the meaning and scope of "intelligent tutoring" originally implemented in stand alone computers. This research is a follow-up to our studies on a "learning companion system" in the late 1980s and its network version, Distributed West, in the early 1990s. In this commentary paper, we first provide the history of and rationale behind our research. We pose and discuss six design dimensions that comprise 12 design questions. This is done on the basis of our previous experience and current knowledge as well as by reexamining the design approach, "cognitive load sharing," in the original paper. Our purpose is to shed light on the future design of reciprocal tutoring. "One-to-one" classrooms, in which students learn with their personal computing devices (Chan et al. 2006), are becoming prevalent in practice; therefore, we expect that reciprocal tutoring--learning-by-tutoring and learning-by-being-tutored--will also become widespread.

This study examined how to foster pupils' mathematical communication abilities by using tablet PCs. Students were encouraged to generate math creations (including mathematical representation, solution, and solution explanation of word problems) as their teaching materials and reciprocally tutor classmates to increase opportunities for mathematical communication during a semester. A reciprocal peer-tutoring-enhanced mathematical communication system was designed for supporting students' math creations and reciprocal peer-tutoring activities. An experiment involving 51 second-graders was conducted to evaluate their improvement in mathematical communication abilities. While the control group received one-to-one self-learning mathematical materials and teacher-led instruction, the experimental group was engaged in computer-supported reciprocal peer tutoring in the same environment with the same materials. Both groups were evaluated by using a mathematical communication ability assessment. The result indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the assessment. Additionally, math creations were analyzed for assessing students' formative development. The results showed that students' math creations became clearer and more efficient. In other words, their mathematical representations and solution explanations became more accurate after the learning activity.

This paper describes a learning system, named My-Bookstore, where students buy (make records of) books (paper books) which they have read, and then sell (recommend) the books they like to others. This system is designed to encourage elementary students' classroom reading and book recommendation. The long-term influence of the My-Bookstore system on students' reading in terms of word usage and perception among 204 first-grade students who had used the system for three semesters was investigated. The results indicated that (a) the students borrowed a large number of books and were willing to recommend their favorite books in My-Bookstore; (b) most of the students felt that the overall use experience of the My-Bookstore was attractive, and the goal of the game was relevant to their reading. They also had confidence in recommending books and felt satisfaction when other students accepted their recommendations.

The study proposed a mix-mode peer response, the E-Peer Response (EPR), to overcome the bias of a single mode, and examined how students with different levels of ability react to the EPR. Two classes participated in this study. One was the experimental group (EG) with the EPR; the other was the control group (CG) with a teacher-centered writing approach. Composition posttest scores were applied to evaluate participants' writing performance while the number of feedback was employed to evaluate students' peer response behavior. The results revealed that students in the EG performed better than those in the CG. This was due to the fact that the EPR provided a convenient online writing environment, a complete writing practice, and a sharable mechanism. High-ability students not only benefited more from the EPR than the low-ability students, but also high-ability students significantly outperformed low-ability students in giving suggestions on content features.

Many students possess low confidence toward learning mathematics, which, in turn, may lead them to give up pursuing more mathematics knowledge. Recently, game-based learning (GBL) is regarded as a potential means in improving students' confidence. Thus, this study tried to promote students' confidence toward mathematics by using GBL. In addition, this study also investigated whether GBL is beneficial to all students with various abilities. The results demonstrated that this approach yielded better outcomes than the paper-based setting in both students' confidence and students' performance. The students with high and low levels of ability in the GBL group gained a significant improvement on the confidence toward mathematics. Additionally, low-ability students in the GBL group attained better mathematics performance than those in the paper-based setting.

As a medium for learning, digital games provide promising possibilities to motivate and engage students in subject learning. In this study, a game-based learning system, My-Pet-My-Quest, is developed to support pupils' math learning. This is due to the fact that most students in Taiwan have relatively lower positive attitude towards math learning, even though their math performance is prominent. To this end, a three-tire framework is proposed to guide the design of the My-Pet-My-Quest system. A quasi-experiment was conducted to examine the influence of game quests on pupils' enjoyment and goal-pursuing in math learning. The results revealed that game quests were favored by students in terms of enjoyment, goal orientation, and goal intensity. Possible reasons for these results and a discussion of related issues are presented in this paper. (Contains 5 tables and 6 figures.)

Our schools have been experiencing three overlapping waves of technology adoption since the mid-1980s: the personal computer lab wave, the online learning wave and the digital classroom wave. In this position paper, I tried to explain why we are now at the onset of the digital classroom wave, why it will cause great changes in education and why those changes could not occur prior to the digital classroom wave. By proposing a series of conjectures, I described with some confidence how classrooms in Taiwan may change. I also believed that some schools in other East Asian countries may experience similar changes. Basically, the classroom will undergo a transition from a pursuit of individualization and productivity in the first stage to the pursuit of personalization and global citizenship in the second stage. The linkage between the first stage and the second stage is also the linkage between the Internet world and the classroom world, which are now virtually separate. Technology adoption is determined by the availability of that technology, and we researchers in the field have little influence over it; however, we can build compelling, sustainable and "disseminable" experimental digital classroom sites to set out classroom reform. To shed light on the development and dissemination of experimental sites, I drew parallels between Deng's economic reform of China and classroom reform. In the process of building digital classroom experimental sites, we are revealing fundamental problems, setting out fundamental changes and hailing the advent of a new era of formal education.

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is essential to career development for teachers. Teachers can develop their own PCK by research-based activities such as action research and lesson study, with a particular emphasis on the employment of classroom practice, information technology, and collaborative learning. However, in recent studies, most of the models for enhancing teachers' PCK focus on individual teachers or teacher groups, and there is less chance of receiving support from the school leadership and institutional resources. This study proposes a development model for PCK known as the 3C-model and implements a support system for it, known as EDUPLAN. The model engages teachers in collaboratively constructing and sharing a knowledge-base of lesson plans with the involvement of different levels of school members for their school's curriculum. Through the process of school-based curriculum development, the model was found to increase teacher PCK and collaboration. Finally, the supporting system is found to be capable of enhancing performance in lesson plan construction and revision and thus the efficiency of PCK development. (Contains 4 tables and 11 figures.)

A web-based learning system has been developed to facilitate question-posing, peer-assessing, item-viewing and drill-and-practice learning activities. In this paper, the pedagogical basis underlying the design and development of the system is explained in the light of information-processing theory, social construction of knowledge theory and social modelling theory. A preliminary study to evaluate the instructional potential of the system has been conducted; this has also identified the factors that influence students' use of the system. Results taken from questionnaires and open-ended questions revealed that by enabling students to play various roles such as composers, critics and adapters, the system was perceived as a cognition-enhancing and motivational learning tool by the participants. Data analysis further indicated that various factors worked together to influence the performance of question-posing.

Web-based learning systems, if designed appropriately, offer many advantages over the traditional learning environments. This study addresses the design and development of new approaches and network technologies based on the newly induced pedagogical models to support collaborative teaching, knowledge sharing, lifelong learning opportunities for anyone to offer or participate in courses free of charge. The authors propose and implement a Web-based learning environment called "School for All" in the Web-based Educities. To satisfy the needs of individual instructors, adaptive Web-based authoring tools and methods of teaching have been proposed, including five adaptive modules--Curriculum Setting, Co-teaching and Privileges Setting, Reward Setting, Assessment Setting and Information Sharing Setting. Thirty representative courses that used this adaptive School for All system were under close observations and investigation. An additional questionnaire was also used to collect online teachers' perceptions of this Web-based learning environment. Online teachers reported that these adaptive modules could support their online teaching effectively. More results were presented and more issues regarding online teaching were discussed in this paper.

Information technology (IT) is becoming increasingly important in K-12 (from kindergarten to senior high school) education. Teachers face growing pressure to interact with their students via networks. However, most teachers require IT assistance to establish a network learning environment. In this study, an approach named ''Educational Applications Providers Platform'' (EAPP), which clearly separates system developers and users, is designed to help teachers easily apply IT to build network learning communities based on existing physical learning communities, and designed to increase interaction frequency and quality both during and after class. Additionally, EAPP assists teachers in integrating physical and network learning communities to proceed with community-based learning. A system named ''EduTowns'' is implemented to realize the EAPP concept. The analytical results demonstrate that the EduTowns system is effective in Taiwanese schools, regardless of whether they are in urban or rural areas. Moreover, the survey results demonstrate that the EAPP is helpful to many teachers. Even teachers with low IT abilities can use the EduTowns system to build and organize hybrid physical and network community-based learning environments. The survey also indicates that teachers use the EduTowns system both at school and at home.

How to use the online social learning communities to improve quality and quantity of interactions in physical social learning communities is an important issue. This work describes the design and implementation of multilayer educational services platforms that enable learners to establish their own online social learning communities and integrate their online social learning communities into a large public social learning portal site--EduCities. Multilayer educational services platforms were designed to integrate various individual online social learning communities, and to map these communities into physical social learning communities. This work proposes and implements an architecture called EduXs, and integrates it with K-12 social learning communities. One year after the EduXs system was released on the Internet, 1,849 schools, 15,772 classes, and 130,908 individuals in Taiwan had registered to use the system to construct their own online social learning communities. Among these registered users, 18.8% of registered schools, and 24.7% of registered classes continue to use the system. Evaluation results indicate that the system is accepted by teachers and students.

Describes the design of an online competitive learning environment that involved three basic competitive forms and 16 competitive activities to stimulate student motivation. Explains "Joyce", a system in which users can compete with either a computer agent or via the Internet. (Author/LRW)

Describes four spaces of network learning models which are designed to integrate the Internet into education. Topics include learning technology; network learning environments; project-based learning; community-based learning; learner location; including distance learning; teacher-centered versus student-centered; interaction, including collaboration, peer tutoring, and competition; media types; knowledge structure; and knowledge acquisition. (Author/LRW)

Describes the design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of three synchronous distributed learning prototype systems: Co-Working System, Working Along System, and Hybrid System. Each supports a particular style of interaction, referred to a socio-activity learning model, between members of student dyads (pairs). All systems were implemented on the Web using Java. (AEF)