Elements of effective instructional design for elementary mathematical problem solving computer software
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem solving is an area of mathematics needing urgent attention by educators. Mathematics organizations, researchers and curriculum strongly advocate for increased problem solving skill development in students. Computer technology may aid some students in learning or practising problem solving skills. This research investigates student perceptions of how effective are instructional design elements of mathematical software, as it relates to their development of problem solving skills. Eighteen instructional design elements were identified from the literature on educational software design. Thirty-two grade five students from varied socio-economic backgrounds in a large district school board in Ontario, Canada, used three mathematical problem solving software programs. For each program, students recorded their perceptions of the effectiveness of each design element in solving mathematical problems, using a written questionnaire and an audiotaped interview. The results of this study indicate that all eighteen identified instructional design elements were judged to be effective by students for learning in mathematical software programs. Students highly rated elements such as feedback, written help and audio guides, because they perceived these elements to aid in their understanding and navigation of the program, as well as provide assistance in persevering with challenging problem solving tasks. Students also felt that having attainable and realistic goals was appropriate. Results sometimes differed according to mathematical ability. For animation elements, low ability students perceived animation to aid in their learning more than high ability students. Low ability students perceived organization and tools in a software program to assist them more in their learning than did the high ability students. Gender did not have any effect on student responses. Examination of the three software programs suggests that they were developed to be gender-neutral. This research indicates that students are aware of software design aspects which aid in their learning, and their insights can provide teachers, software developers and software reviewers with instructional design elements (e.g. narrated text written on screen, constant feedback on progress, detailed graphics, realistic goals) to consider when designing or acquiring educational software.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".