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Virvou, Katsionis, & Manos, Combining software games with education: Evaluation of its educational effectiveness

Reading summary/quotes:


This article describes a study in which students were allowed to play a video game that taught geography. The study was a two part evaluation comparing an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) to a game using the same pedagogical engine underneath. Both parts used a pre-test versus post-test comparison of learners using both the ITS and game. The first part of the evaluation used a random sample from one school. The second part used a stratified random sample from a second group. The stratification for the second group was based on prior performance in the academic subject being studied. The end result was that the students who played the video game did better than students who used the ITS computer program (drill and practice). Students who struggled in class tended to do better using the video game than those students who are doing well in class.

“The process of learning is a very complex cognitive task that can be very imposing on students (p. 54).”

“Brody points out that the marriage of education and game-like entertainment has produced some not-very-educational games and some not very-entertaining learning activities (p. 54).”

“One could argue that the greatest advantage of games is the motivation provided to students by the game environment whereas one possible disadvantage for the learning cprocecss could be the students' distraction by this game environment (p. 57).”

“School children usually have a preconception of educational means as being totally different from entertainment... An entertaining aspect of education would be rather unexpected (p. 57).”

"However, despite the fact that all students had liked the game in the context of their classroom work, a large part of them criticized the game in comparison with other commercial games (p. 63).”

Discussion points/questions:



Contributors: Tom Caswell, Marion Jensen, Jennifer Jorgensen, Jon Scoresby, and Tim Stowell