Exploring the Subtleties of Agency and Indirect Control in Digital Learning Games

How do the features of a learning environment's user interface impact learners' agency and, further, their learning? We explored this question in the context of Decimal Point, a digital learning game designed to support middle school students in learning decimals. Previous studies of the game showed that giving students the ability to choose the order and number of mini-games to play did not significantly impact their learning outcomes compared to a condition without choice. In this paper we explore whether some elements of the game's interface may have inadvertently exerted indirect control over students' choice, leading to the previous effects. We conducted a classroom study using a new version of the game that varied whether students saw a visual path connecting mini-games on the game map to modulate the level of indirect control students would experience with an implied ordering. Ultimately, we found that students in the no-line condition exercised significantly more agency but did not learn any less than the line condition. These results suggest that indirect control can be a subtle but powerful way to direct student attention in digital learning games.

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