The effects of an interactive e-book based on the ARCS motivation model on students' academic achievements, mathematics anxiety, and motivation

The main purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of interactive book enhanced mathematics instruction on undergraduate students' mathematics related academic achievement, anxiety, and motivation. While participants in control group attended their regular instruction, students in experimental group were exposed to interactive books designed by researchers on three units (functions, polynomials, and quadratic equations) stated above besides their regular instruction. The study group of this research consisted of 94 students from Technology Faculty. Based on strategies of ARCS motivation model, we designed the outlines for the course content. After controlling strategies and the outlines, the content of whole material was organized by a mathematic instructor. Then all the content was transferred into interactive book format. This interactive book was distributed to the students in the experimental group to use with their mobile devices during experiment. In control group, traditional teaching method was used, while experimental group was subject to interactive books enriched instructional settings which interactive books were used orderly depending on course content. Academic achievement test, instructional material motivation survey and mathematic anxiety survey performed within quantitative data collection process of research. The results show that the interactive book which was designed based on the ARCS motivation model strategies increased students' academic achievement and motivation and decreased anxiety. Participants in the experimental group stated they enjoyed several features of the interactive book. Those features were as following: videos, enough amount of text, no-need for internet connection, opportunity to change text size, allowance to take notes, allowance to listen, and allowance for repetition. In addition, they mentioned some disadvantages about using interactive books including not having necessary skills to use such books, different study skills, and storage issues. This study has a critical importance for including first interactive book that was designed based on a specific motivational model in the literature.