Research

Our contention is that metacognitive awareness on the part of students can be improved through systematic and direct instructions on strategic reading. To support that, three important metacognitive reading interventions, as detailed below, are carefully designed into our interactive game activities.

• Road Map training – In the project, a road map is integrated into our game stories providing students with study guides. The study guide is a set of suggestions and/or interspersed questions designed to lead students through a problem solving process by directing attention to the key ideas and suggesting the application of skills needed to solve the problem successfully.

• What I Know-What I Want to Know- What I have Solved (KWS) training – Our project adapts a well known reading strategy, What I Know-What I Want to Know- What I Have Learned (KWL) into our games. The KWS provides a 3-column chart structure to activate students’ prior knowledge by recalling what students know about a problem (K), to motivate students to read/think by asking what they want to know (W), and finally to review what part of the problem has been resolved and what is yet to be solved (S). The KWS chart can be visited and re-visited through the games by players, forcing them to conduct the sophisticated kind of thinking required for drawing inferences and developing interpretations.

                                      

• Think-Aloud-Share-Solve (TA2S) training – Students appear to learn a great deal through mutual exploration, meaning-making, and ample feedback. TA2S is a variation of the collaborative learning strategies, Think-Aloud and Pair Problem-solving, and implemented via online chatting in our games.