Personalized Inquiry and Game-based Learning Approaches for Supporting University Students’ Achievement and Emotional Engagement

Abstract

Personalized learning has been widely recognized as an effective approach to address individual student needs; however, many systems face challenges in supporting students to explore content while maintaining motivation and enjoyment systematically. To address these limitations, the Augmented Reality, Inquiry-Based Personalized Gaming (ARIPG) framework integrates the strengths of Augmented Reality (AR), inquiry-based learning, and personalized learning to compensate for the limitations inherent in each approach, resulting in a more coherent and balanced learning model. While AR enhances the visualization and contextualization of abstract concepts, inquiry-based learning promotes active knowledge construction and scientific inquiring, and personalized learning addresses individual differences among learners. By synergistically combining these approaches, ARIPG creates a holistic learning environment that leverages its complementary advantages to support both cognitive and affective learning outcomes. An experiment was conducted in a biochemical university course to evaluate students’ learning achievement and the role of emotional engagement. The results indicated that students who learned with the ARIPG approach significantly outperformed those in a conventional personalized gaming environment. Moreover, the findings revealed no significant differences in achievement between students with low and high levels of affection, suggesting that the proposed approach can effectively support diverse learners’ emotional engagement.