Een spelgebaseerde aanpak voor het leren van breuken. Een onderzoek naar wiskundeangst en het potentieel van adaptieve digitale educatieve games.

The development of mathematical proficiency is a key objective within education, given its importance for personal and social advancement. One important domain in which students need to develop mathematical proficiency is fractions, since fraction understanding is an important predictor for more advanced mathematical skills. Children show large individual differences in the development of cognitive and non-cognitive factors playing a role in learning mathematics, and fractions in particular. In terms of cognitive factors, some individuals experience difficulties because they develop misconceptions while learning fractions. In terms of non-cognitive factors, feelings of math anxiety, low math self-concept, or low motivation towards math might hinder the acquisition of fraction understanding. Given these frequently observed cognitive and non-cognitive difficulties hindering fraction learning among students, there is a clear need to improve students' fraction understanding. In this regard, digital educational technology has been proposed in recent years to address these cognitive and non-cognitive stumbling blocks, with digital educational games being considered particularly promising. Given the individual differences among students, there has been a growing interest in the game design element of adaptivity, which refers to adapting the game environment to meet learners' specific needs. The current doctoral project aims to investigate the effectiveness of adaptive feedback within a digital educational game to improve fraction understanding. The effects for cognitive and non-cognitive learning outcomes are examined, taking into account individual differences between learners. Because little is known about how to measure non-cognitive learning outcomes, we first unraveled conceptual issues concerning the distinction between state and trait components of math anxiety and the domain-specificity of math anxiety, as well as methodological issues by investigating how math anxiety can be assessed reliably.