Kehk, Bee Lian

With the emergence of 3D virtual environments like Second-Life providing new avenues in education, expression and interaction, it begs to question the effectiveness of learning in such environments for its relevance and meaning to the user. Much research has propounded the advantages of technology in learning. In our previous study with a group of trainee teachers in digital 3-Dimensional Art-making, we found that virtual environments like Second-Life surpasses the physical limitations one usually associates with a traditional ‘real world’ art studio. Virtual environments open up possibilities in art making. For instance, students can defy natural laws of physics and gravity as well as have little constraint on scale and space. Most importantly, among the Millennial Generation (Strauss & Howe, 1991) the 3D virtual environment is fast becoming the defacto paradigm through which they learn, see and experience things like knowledge, pleasure and entertainment. In the wake of constructivism and problem-based learning (PBL), many educators are re-looking at traditional approaches to learning and training. In such an environment, we would like to question the following: 1. Can learning of concepts and principles of image-making take place in a 3D multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) using PBL and constructivist approach? 2. Will there be transference of learning to real-life context? Our study shows that 3D MUVE provides opportunities for art learning. Although the aspects of transference are difficult to quantify, active knowledge construction was present and the trainee teachers had shown through their works that their acquired knowledge was more than what was anticipated.

While SDT has been well researched in many areas of studies, not much study has been carried out for Art. This study aims to examine the effective strategies used by art teachers to improve students’ motivation to learn art. It will attempt to link these strategies to the three basic psychological needs (BPN) of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and thereby hope to understand the effectiveness of these strategies from the perspective of SDT. At the same time, this study will also explore the difference in motivation level between younger and older students and attempt to investigate whether motivation strategies are the same between the younger and older students. This study used a mixed method approach that includes both qualitative and quantitative data to collate its findings. An online Google survey form was sent out and 17 MOE art teachers and one MOE art vendor responded. This anonymous survey consisted of eight main questions, which were subdivided into 53 related questions. These include 13 open-ended, 26 ordinal, nine nominal, four binary and one matric question. In this paper, we are presenting the results of the study, which demonstrated that self determination strategies, as a motivation approach, were extremely effective when used by art teachers in art classes, as 82.4% of the qualitative links could be drawn to satisfying one or more of the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness, and competence. This study has also revealed that Upper Primary students are more inclined towards a motivation approach that is competence based.