A Game-Based Student Response System: Engaging Assessment in the Classroom

Introduction

The rapid growth of technology has affected our lives drastically over the last years. Technological tools, such as Internet, computers, smart phones, social media have become an important part of our daily lives. Especially for “digital natives” (Prensky, 2007) who were born in a digital age, technology is not anything special. They don’t even view technology as technology because it is an ordinary tool they use in every minute of their time. Being a teacher of these digital natives in the 21st century is a great challenge as it requires technological and methodological skills according to the needs of the students’ profile. In order to support 21st Century students’ learning, teachers are expected to use emerging technologies to support student learning (Drent & Meelissen, 2008). The use of Web 2.0 technologies in education could prepare students to this rapidly changing world as they “blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18).

Over the last years there has been growing interest in the use of Web 2.0 tools in education. In order to prepare students to this changing world, teachers continuously seek new instructional approaches compare to traditional teaching methods. At this point, Web 2.0 tools help teachers to rethink the way to transform their instructional approaches to support more active and meaningful learning. There are many Web 2.0 tools that can be used in education to share knowledge (Kale & Goh, 2014). Web 2.0 tools in education have claimed to be effective in facilitating learning, interaction and collaboration by connecting students and resources (Attwell, 2007). Since the passive learning environments are considered as ineffectual, active learning takes its place and promote student participation. In this regard, Student response systems (SRSs) are used to make learning more interactive and engaging by helping teachers to create a student-centered learning environments (Wu, Wu, & Li, 2017; Fuller & Dawson, 2017). The student response system (SRS) is kind of a voting system by which an instructor can collect students’ responses to given questions immediately in class.

Student response systems (SRSs) are used to provide classroom interaction with handheld devices such as “clickers” (Caldwell, 2007). These systems are usually called as interactive classroom systems, classroom response systems, audience response systems, learner response systems, or electronic response systems (Wang, 2015). They are frequently used as formative assessment tool for students to answer multiple-choice questions. SRSs are useful tools for teachers to assess students’ knowledge about the topic. Even though SRSs are found to provide promising outcomes, they are limited on student motivation and engagement (Wang, 2015). They have some challenges such as time needed to learn and setup issues (Kay & LeSage, 2009). In the past, SRSs also had issues with investment in hardware devices (Wang, Zhu, Saetre, 2016). For example, in 1960s and 1970s, dials, buttons, or number pads were attached at students’ seats (Judson & Sawada, 2002) so that they could dial answers from A to E. Thus, SRS use in those times was expensive and hard to use in a regular classroom. During 1990s, with the development of personal computers, the cost decreased (Cardoso, 2011). The use of SRSs nowadays is much easier to access and implement in classrooms. Studies related to SRSs have found that students find using smart phones to technologically convenient to answer questions (Yoon, 2017).