Facilitating Mathematical Argumentation by Gamification: A Gamified Mobile Collaborative Learning Approach for Math Courses

Collaborative mathematical argumentation plays an important role in mathematics education. However, students often focus on the efficiency of solving problems and neglect the importance of expressing statements and reasoning in the collaborative argumentation process. Due to the weak knowledge changes in group argumentation, students' learning motivation, tendency to collaborate, and learning achievement hardly improve during this process. To this end, we developed a gamified collaborative argumentation approach (GCA) that incorporates multiple gamification mechanisms to encourage students to participate in group arguments and express their arguments. Through technology-assisted gamification interventions, the teacher rewarded the students' collaborative argumentation performance during the activity; meanwhile, the students tracked their individual and group learning performance and improved the quality of their group arguments, which motivated them to contribute to the team. A 4-week empirical study was conducted to examine the impact of this learning model on fifth-grade students' mathematics learning. The students in the experimental group (N = 26) learned with the conventional collaborative argumentation approach (CCA) in the first 2 weeks (560 min), and learned with the GCA approach in the last 2 weeks (560 min), while the control group (N = 26) was taught using the conventional collaborative argumentation approach (CCA). The results indicated that students' learning achievement, mathematical learning motivation, and tendency to collaborate in mathematics significantly improved with the aid of GCA. The lag sequential pattern analysis showed that the gamification mechanism encouraged students to analyze the solutions again and reconfirm the definition of the mathematical problems. Accordingly, it was found that the gamified approach stimulated students to be more careful in considering the best solution and actively participate in the argumentation, which fulfills the goal of collaborative mathematical argumentation.