Abstract:

Educators and researchers need an easily operated, convenient, and powerful tool to quickly and accurately assess the early numeracy skills of young learners. It enables educators to identify low-achieving students in order to provide them with additional instructional support. Preschool and primary teachers must be able to quickly and reliably assess a student's specific strengths and limitations, as well as location on a learning trajectory, in order to effectively design whole-class, small group, and individual instruction or remedial efforts. Teachers must also assess incoming students for developmental readiness as well as any learning difficulties. But in reality, teachers have little time to accurately evaluate children's growth due to a variety of external factors, such as their demanding jobs and teacher shortages. Other than the limited availability of screening tests for early numeracy, one of the key problems with existing assessments is the test anxiety that it brings inherently. Findings support cognitive-behavioral formulations of anxiety and strongly suggest that anxiety may complicate the assessment process. Which as a result, snatches away the ability of learners to express and translate their learning effectively. The integration of gaming elements into an assessment practice proved to enhance children's involvement. The study's findings revealed that adopting game-based assessment lowered test anxiety and increased engagement, and further showed that assessment bias associated with test anxiety may be reduced, creating a fairer evaluation setting. But the more important question lies in maintaining engagement in such game-based assessments. Engagement is a key component of game-based learning environments and directly correlates with learning. It can increase involvement in the learning environment and essentially stimulate the audience’s capability to think and create meaning. Research indicates that not every game, particularly educational ones, necessarily maintains students' interest over time, highlighting the challenge of ensuring sustained engagement in educational gaming experiences.

This paper examines and improves one such electronic game-based standardized assessment from the perspective of students’ engagement and distraction. The authors conduct design-based research to identify the shortcomings of the assessment, provide appropriate solutions for it and test it again to find new insights to address. The findings of this study are particularly helpful to inform the literature on sustaining engagement in game-based assessments through utilizing innovative approaches to contribute to the field.

The study is guided by the following purposes:
1. to identify barriers to learning and design improvements in Electronic Game-based Assessment.
2. to apply a theory based approach grounded in effective game-design and numeracy acquisition to improve the design of the assessment.

Keywords:

Technology, Game-based Assessment, Engagement, Test Anxiety.