The Importance of Teacher Bridging in Game-Based Learning Classrooms

Advances in game-based learning and educational data mining enable novel methods of formative assessment that can reveal implicit understandings that students may demonstrate in games but may not express formally on a test. This chapter explores a framework of bridging in game-based learning classes, where teachers leverage and build upon students' game-based implicit learning experiences to support science classroom learning. Bridging was studied with two physics learning games in about 30 high-school classes per game. Results from both studies show that students in bridging classes performed better on external post-tests, when accounting for pre-test scores, than in classes that only played the game or did not play the game at all. These findings suggest the teachers' role is critical in game-based learning classes. Effective bridging includes providing teachers with common game examples along with actionable discussion points or activities to connect game-based learning with classroom content.

Motor coordination and its implications on teaching tennis to three to six-year-old children

The practice of coordinative exercises contributes not only to develop technique but also to improve decision-making quality during the game. This study presents practical possibilities to stimulate motor coordination applied to three to six-year-old children during tennis classes. The methodological proposals of the Ball School and Universal Sport Initiation focus on a general education of the individuals and defend the so-called “playing to learn” and “learning while playing”. This way, implicit learning is stimulated considering the perception of children and the conditions/restrictions of the tasks performed during practice.

The role of implicit learning and cue ambiguity on the subjective experience of affective predictions: a follow-up behavioral investigation.

People use their previous experience to predict present affective events. Since we live in ever-changing environments, affective predictions must generalize from past contexts (from which they are implicitly learned) to new, potentially ambiguous contexts. This study investigated how past (un)certain relationships influence subjective experience following new ambiguous cues, and whether past relationships can be learned implicitly. Two S1-S2 paradigms were employed as learning and test phases in two experiments. S1s were colored circles, S2s negative or neutral affective pictures. Participants (N = 121, 116) were assigned to the certain (CG) or uncertain group (UG), and they were presented with 100% (CG) or 50% (UG) S1-S2 congruency during an uninstructed (Experiment 1) or implicit (Experiment 2) learning phase. During the test phase both groups were presented with a new 75% S1-S2 paradigm, and ambiguous (Experiment 1) or unambiguous (Experiment 2) S1s. Participants were asked to rate the expected valence of upcoming S2s (expectancy ratings), or their experienced valence and arousal (valence and arousal ratings). In Experiment 1 ambiguous cues elicited less negative expectancy ratings, and less unpleasant valence ratings, independently from prior experience. In Experiment 2, participants in the CG reported more negative expectancy ratings after the S1s previously paired with negative stimuli. Overall, we found that in the presence of ambiguous cues subjective affective experience is dampened, and we confirmed that people are able to infer probabilistic relationships from the environment (and to use them later) at an implicit level.

Some Aspects of Pedagogical Corpora

This essay focuses on the characteristics of corpora drawn from pedagogical materials and contrasts them with the properties of corpora of larger repertoires. Two case studies show pedagogical corpora to contain relatively more chromaticism, and to devote more of their probability mass to low-frequency events. This is likely due to the formatting of and motivation behind classroom materials (for example, focusing proportionately more resources on difficult concepts). I argue that my observations challenge the utility of using pedagogical corpora within research into implicit learning. I also suggest that these datasets are uniquely situated to yield insights into explicit learning, and into how musical traditions are represented in the classroom.