Enhancing achievement and interest in mathematics learning through Math-Island

Abstract

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 lowachieving students and the high-achieving students in the experimental school maintained a rather high level of interest in mathematics and in the system.

Developing an Interactive Mathematics Multimedia Learning Based on Ispring Presenter in Increasing Students’ Interest in Learning Mathematics

“…The interest in learning is a very important influence on the success of learning, especially in mathematics learning. Students' interest is one of the internal factors that influence students' learning achievement known as conditions or situations related to individual desires or needs (Yeh, Cheng, Chen, Liao, & Chan, 2019) Interest is always related to wants or needs. It is important to create conditions so that the students always need and want to learn.…”

“…A person with high interest will have high motivation. A high learning interest will make the students' have positive attitudes towards mathematics (Azmidar, Darhim, & Dahlan, 2017;Yeh et al, 2019) The students' Interest in learning can be caused by the learning media used by the teacher. Many schools have facilities and infrastructure that are quite complete and well-classified.…”

Classroom Management for Early Childhood Group Setting

“…For this reason, this study attempted to visualize the structure of knowledge in an educational game. In other words, a knowledge map was visualized and gamified so that students could make decisions to construct their own knowledge map in games [16].…”

Adaptasi Test of Mathematical Ability (TOMA-3)

“…Kemampuan matematika menjadi prediktor terhadap prestasi matematika yang akan dicapai oleh siswa (Nizoloman, 2013;Siegler, Duncan, Davis-Kean, Duckworth, Claessen, Engel, & Chen 2012). Sebaliknya, siswa yang mengalami kendala atau kesulitan dalam belajar matematika menghasilkan prestasi matematika yang rendah (Geary, 2011;Yeh, Cheng, Chen, Liao, & Chan, 2019). Siswa yang mengalami kesulitan belajar matematika tersebut perlu mendapatkan asesmen melalui tes kemampuan matematika terstandar sehingga intervensi yang diberikan sesuai kebutuhan siswa (Swanson, Moran, Lussier & Fung, 2014;Swanson, Lussier, & Orosco, 2013;Swanson, Moran, Bocian, Lussier, & Zhang, 2012).…”