Should students use digital scratchpads? Impact of using a digital assistive tool on arithmetic problem-solving

An excessive cognitive load may reduce a student’s problem-solving performance by preventing effective learning. Using an assistive tool, such as a notepad, can reduce such extraneous cognitive while solving a problem, thereby improving a student’s performance. In this paper, we collected game log data from an educational game, called “Double digit”, which has a digital scratchpad as an assistive tool that can be used to reduce student’s cognitive load. We examine whether a correlation exists between the amount of “digital scratchpad usage” and a student’s “game performance”. Game log data, which consisted of 1,440,000 actions, was collected from 418 students in kindergarten to grade 2. Our data analysis using person-correlation shows a significant positive relationship between digital scratchpad usage and game performance for all three game difficulty levels. Interestingly, the correlation increases as the game difficulty level increases. This suggests that as game level difficulty increases, which requires a higher cognitive load of a student, students who used the digital scratchpad had higher game performance.