Effects of incorporating a two-tier assessment-based guiding mechanism into contextual games on students’ learning achievement and behaviors in horticultural education

Digital games have been used in various disciplines to enhance students’ learning interest and effectiveness through the gaming contexts. However, most of the digital educational games use multiple-choice questions to confirm students’ learning status, implying the challenge of understanding the actual learning status of students. Also, the gaming system cannot analyze the possible reasons for students’ wrong answers and so provide suggestions. Therefore, this study proposed a two-tier assessment-based contextual gaming (TTA-CG) approach to confirm whether students correctly answer the questions based on the right reasons as well as identifying the reasons for students’ wrong answers. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted in a horticulture course. Two classes of first-year vocational high school students were recruited as the participants. One class with 35 students was the experimental group learning with the TTA-CG approach; the other class with 35 students was the control group adopting the conventional contextual gaming (C-CG) approach. The experimental results showed that the TTA-CG approach was more effective than the C-CG approach in terms of enhancing students’ learning achievement, motivation, and self-efficacy. In addition, there was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of cognitive load .