From motivational experience to creative writing: A motivational AR-based learning approach to promoting Chinese writing performance and positive writing behaviours

Abstract

The ability to write is one of the key literacies required by students in relation to 21st century skills and is an emphasis of early education. Although the ability to write is a vital foundation for further education, due to the lack of authentic experience and limited instructional methods, cultivating writing ability in the early stage of education is still a significant challenge for students in elementary schools. Therefore, the majority of students are not able to actively engage in the process of learning to write. To address these problems, this study proposes a motivational AR-based (MAR) learning approach to support students in learning to write, which not only provides an authentic learning environment, but also aims to motivate students' active writing. Its effects were verified through a quasi-experiment. A total of 47 elementary school students from China were invited to participate, and were assigned to either an experimental group (EG) which was exposed to the MAR approach or the control group (CG) which was exposed to the motivational learning approach in a conventional environment (MC). The results showed that the proposed MAR learning approach improved the students' writing performance in terms of feature descriptiveness and thinking innovation. It can be found that, compared with the CG, the achievement gaps between the low- and high-engagement students were much larger in the EG. In addition, the sequential pattern analysis results showed that students who learned with the MAR learning approach concentrated more on the process of observation than those who learned with the MC learning approach, and they tended to exhibit less distracted behaviours. To sum up, the proposed MAR learning approach was effective in terms of facilitating elementary school students’ writing education. The main contribution of our study is that it provides evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed MAR learning approach and opens up opportunities for future studies which aim to further explore its impacts in different designs of writing learning activities.