Interactive learning environments can provide learners with opportunities to explore rich, real-world problem spaces, but the nature of these problem spaces can make assessing learner progress difficult. Such assessment can be useful for providing formative and summative feedback to the learners, to educators, and to the designers of the…

Previous studies on business simulation games (BSGs) have concluded that improved performance may not be the primary benefit of using BSGs, due to mixed results between student performance and perceptions. Two relevant and insightful issues attract our attention, namely, the impacts of the heterogeneous student population and the different…

This study examines how academic assertiveness in junior high school students affects conceptual change and the degree to which their assertiveness affects the conceptual change of partners paired with them for a series of activities using a computer simulation of the human cardiovascular system. The sample was a group of 90 eighth-grade students…