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a sentence and generating a self-explanation, and so on. The game ends when one
of the player tokens lands on the last board space, and a series of mini-awards are
displayed for various in-game performance characteristics.
iSTART-ME Discussion
Situating iSTART within a game-based environment helps to address two limita-
tions from the original design. This new game environment for extended practice
should increase interest and engagement to help sustain the long-term interac-
tions, and it hopefully provides a measuring stick by which students can gauge
their own progress toward goals and even compare performance among peers. The
addition of MiBoard, as an alternative to extended practice, offers the option of
peer-to-peer collaborative learning with a game-based twist. The combination of
iSTART-ME extended practice and MiBoard Game simultaneously capitalizes on
the benefits found from previous training interventions, and attempts to address the
aforementioned shortcomings of each.
The collection of game-based features in iSTART-ME was selected for imple-
mentation because they are positively associated with various aspects of motivation
(McNamara, Jackson, & Graesser, 2009), they are easily implemented within the
current iSTART system architecture (Jackson et al., 2009), and they allow for nearly
infinite gameplay (unlike narrative or immersive environments where a plot dictates
length of play).
General Discussion
Throughout this chapter we have focused on the evolution of a training program
designed to teach students effective self-explanation strategies. This training pro-
gram began as an individual human-to-human intervention (SERT one-on-one),
incorporated that same training within a classroom-based collaborative learning
environment (SERT group), transitioned into a highly distributable effective self-
paced tutoring system (iSTART), and is currently being adapted into a game-based
learning environment with collaborative peer-to-peer gameplay (iSTART-ME, with
MiBoard). Each transition was designed to address potential limitations from a
previous version and to improve upon the overall training effectiveness.
Each version of the training manipulated similar pedagogical principles. The
goal of training has always been to teach students specific self-explanation strate-
gies, and this skill acquisition has predominantly been achieved through the use
of modeling, scaffolding, and fading. All training versions incorporate an intro-
duction to the specific self-explanation strategies (modeling), a demonstration of
someone else exhibiting both good and poor performance (scaffolding), and a prac-
tice session where each student applies the strategies to a text (fading). Despite the
different implementations, all versions of the self-explanation training proved to
be successful at promoting learning gains (i.e., improving reading comprehension).
