Abstract
In this paper we investigate the potential of surprise on learning with prevocational students in the domain of proportional reasoning. Surprise involves an emotional reaction, but it also serves a cognitive goal as it directs attention to explain why the surprising event occurred and to learn for the future. Experiment 1 - comparing a surprise condition with a control condition - found no differences, but the results suggested that surprise may be beneficial for higher level students. In Experiment 2 we combined Expectancy strength (Strong vs. Weak) with Surprise (Present vs. Absent) using higher level students. We found a marginal effect of surprise on learning indicating that students who experienced surprises learned more than students who were not exposed to these surprises but we found a stronger positive effect of surprise when we included existing proportional reasoning skill as factor. These results provide evidence that narrative techniques such as surprise can be used for the purpose of learning.
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This research is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (project Number No. 411-00-003).
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Wouters, P., van Oostendorp, H., ter Vrugte, J., vanderCruysse, S., de Jong, T., Elen, J. (2016). The Role of Surprise in Game-Based Learning for Mathematics. In: De Gloria, A., Veltkamp, R. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9599. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40216-1_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40216-1_45
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