Effects of Technology-Enhanced Board Game in Primary Mathematics Education on Students’ Learning Performance

Abstract

In primary schools, mathematics is a fundamental and an important subject since mathematical concepts and skills are useful to address life and professional problems. Nevertheless, many mathematical concepts are abstract to primary students that may possibly cause them to learn mathematics with poor learning motivation and performance. To address this problem, it is important to promote students to review and apply mathematical concepts after they learn. In traditional mathematics classrooms, teachers usually assign exercises to students for conducting review and application activities after formal mathematics instructions. However, such learning activities may tend to make students less motivated to conduct them and further negatively affect their learning performance. Therefore, this study adopted a technology-enhanced board game to support teachers and students to conduct prime factorization education in traditional mathematics classrooms. The aim of this study is to apply the proposed board game to facilitate students to review and apply prime factorization concepts after traditional classroom learning, and further enhance their learning performance. To evaluate the proposed approach, 22 primary students were allocated to an experimental group and a control group to participate in an experiment. The experimental group was supported by the board game approach to conduct review and application activities after traditional mathematics learning, while the control group utilized a traditional exercise approach to conduct review and application activities after traditional mathematics learning. The research results revealed that the proposed approach not only promoted the students’ learning achievements in prime factorization education, but also improved their learning motivation and attitude.