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Dissertation
Year: 2016 Publisher: Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Psychologie en Pedagogische Wetenschappen
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The Monty Hall Dilemma is a statistical problem for which the right solution gave rise to a huge debate because of its counterintuitive character. The situation is the following: three closed doors are presented to a candidate. One of them hides a car and the other two doors hide a goat. After pointing a door, the quizmaster, who knows which door hides the car, opens one of the remaining two doors with a goat behind. Then the candidate is proposed the choice: Does he stay with his first choice, or does he switch to the other unopened door? Because of cognitive and emotional biases, people are tending to stay with their first choice, while this is not the right solution. Much interventional research exists to improve people's switch behaviour and understanding of the MHD. Improving the first is not that difficult, but improving people's understanding is rarely successful. Yet that kind of research only takes into account the short-term effect of these interventions, but not the long-term effect. In this research however, we want to investigate both the short-term and the long-term effect of a digital game to people's behaviour and understanding when confronted with the Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD). From three different schools, students in the fifth and sixth grade were collected. After administering a pretest to get an idea of participant's previous knowledge about the MHD, the participants in the experimental conditions got the opportunity to play the game with three and twenty doors (Only Play condition), to read an explanation with visualization about the MHD (Only Explanation condition), or to do both (Both Play and Explanation condition). Participants in the Control condition had to fulfill a neutral task while the others played the digital game. After twenty minutes, they all filled in the posttest. This was, besides the classical MHD, composed of some variations on the classical MHD. After two months, a follow-up test, which was equal to the posttest, was administered to check if the knowledge they had gathered from the digital game was still present. The results revealed a clear effect in advantage of the participants in the Experimental conditions. Their switch percentages (behaviour) and scores on the variations (understanding) were significantly higher than for the people in the Control condition, as well in the short-term as in the long-term. More specific, getting an explanation was most determining for behaviour and understanding in the short- term, while in the long-term, also playing the game became important. Although the students seem to show little motivation and interest in the game, as well a short-term as a long-term effect was found. However, adapted and further research is necessary. With this study, we wanted to incite other researchers to build on, improve, and expand the research about educational games in itself and their long-term value for increasing the insight in the reasoning behind the MHD. This way, educational game design, which is still in its infancy, can be carried to a higher dimension and in time, may become useful for a wide range of educational purposes.
Dissertation
Year: 2016 Publisher: Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Psychologie en Pedagogische Wetenschappen
Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark
Loading...Choose an application
- Reference Manager
- EndNote
- RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)
The Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) is a probability problem with a counterintuitive solution. Even though statistically the chance of winning the car is doubled by switching to the other door, people show a ten In this study we wanted to investigate whether the use of a digital learning object can help people gain insight into the MHD. More specifically, we wanted to see if people can learn to select the correct strategy and learn to calculate the probabilities correctly for the classical version of the MHD with three doors and for more complex versions with more than three doors through the use of a digital learning object. Furthermore, we wanted to investigate whether providing the participants with more instructions regarding the use of simulation software or a visualised explanation of the MHD further improved their skills. The digital learning object allowed participants to run repeated trials of the MHD and provided them with conditional frequency feedback. Students from the last two years of secondary school were selected to participate in this study. In total, 219 students from five different secondary schools participated. They were randomly assigned to one of the five conditions. There was one control condition (C) in which the participants were asked to complete a task using E-prime. The four other conditions were experimental conditions, in which the participants were allowed to use the simulation sections of the digital learning object. The participants from the first experimental condition (E1) were only allowed to use the simulation sections of the digital learning object. The participants from the second experimental condition (E2) were also given instructions on how to use the simulation tool. In the third experimental condition (E3) participants were advised to use the extremes of the strategy slider in order to optimally compare the effectiveness of the two strategies. The participants from the fourth experimental condition (E4) were advised to use the extremes of the strategy slider and were allowed access to the visualised explanations of the MHD with three doors and the MHD with twenty doors in the digital learning object. A pretest and a posttest were performed to evaluate the participants performance when solving different versions of the MHD. The results of this study show that participants from the experimental conditions were more likely to select the correct strategy and calculate the probabilities correctly when solving different versions of the MHD than the participants from the control condition. However, if we look at the performance of the participants on each of the versions of the MHD individually, we see that the participants from the experimental conditions are only more likely to select the correct strategy in the classical version of the MHD and in a version where the correct strategy was 'it does not matter what you do'. This indicates that the participants were not able to transfer what they had learned through the use of the digital learning object to more complex versions of the MHD. No significant differences were found between the participants of the different experimental conditions in their abilities to select the correct strategy or calculate the probabilities correctly when solving the MHD.
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