AnswerPro: Designing to Motivate Interaction

Peer Learning

Peoples’ social ties can act as potentially rich resources for information (Liccardi et al., 2007), which can be tailored to their specific needs in a more efficient manner than other resources. This has been found to be especially true for children. Various studies (e.g. Nelson-Le Gall & Glor-Scheib, 1985; Good et al., 1987) have shown that older children (from around the age of 11) consider their peers as important potential sources of academic support. This ‘peer learning’ has been shown to have many benefits such as encouraging the development of accurate and superior understanding, and promoting creative thinking (Manion & Alexander, 1997; Sporer & Brunstein, 2009). As such, social media and mobile technologies could potentially be used to support such learners, although, we believe it necessary to design specific features that would motivate pupils’ recurrent use of such systems otherwise it is possible they would not use these tools sufficiently frequently to provide an academic benefit.