What Makes Learning Fun? Exploring the Influence of Choice and Difficulty on Mind Wandering and Engagement during Learning

The influence of consequence value and text difficulty on affect, attention, and learning while reading instructional texts

“…Mind wandering was also reported more frequently during the difficult texts. This effect replicates previous research which found more mind wandering when reading difficult versus easy texts (Feng et al, 2013;Mills et al, 2013). Despite the increase in mind wandering, however, text difficulty did not have a negative influence on learning on either the posttest and transfer test.…”

Comparing usability and engagement between a serious game and a traditional online program

“…Indeed, engagement is a multifaceted term referring to a person's involvement in a specific activity. Stemming from examinations on pupil engagement in school-work [32], one succinct description of engagement suggests it is "a complex metaconstruct with behavioural, affective and cognitive components that vary both situationally and dispositionally" [53]. We suggest that differentiating engagement into these components, "Behavioural Engagement", "Affective Engagement" and "Cognitive Engagement" allows for more targeted measurement of the different aspects of engagement and also suggests a variety of approaches that might be required to better quantifying the various components of engagement.…”

A Concurrent Think Aloud Study of Engagement and Usability in a Serious Game

“…Stemming from examinations on pupil engagement in school-work [10], one succinct description of engagement suggests it is "a complex meta-construct with behavioural, affective and cognitive components that vary both situationally and dispositionally" [11]. The concept of engagement in interface design has further been related to the notions of immersion, presence, flow and absorption [12].…”

“…Other, more objective, tests related to physiology, such as eye-blink and scanning, have also been suggested to measure this aspect of engagement [18]. Once again individual characteristics might impact on this type of engagement and dynamic difficulty [11] approaches have been used to try and ensure challenges meet the player's changing ability levels. This a key relationship often attributed to players being in a high zone of performance.…”

“…Affective processing might be measured in response to a simple emotional cue, and can be positive or negative. More complex emotional states such as curiosity, fun [22], interest and excitement can be measured using more traditional subjective feedback [11] or approaches such as think aloud [23]. Quantitative measures of Affect in interface design focus on determining valence and arousal.…”