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A multidimensional evaluation of the effectiveness of adaptive digital educational games

Boek - Dissertatie

The development of math and reading is an important goal during primary education. Early numerical skills and reading skills have been shown predictive for children's future academic performance and it has been argued that the training of these skills at young age prevents children from later difficulties in math and reading. However, many children still experience difficulties acquiring these fundamental skills and a tendency towards more inclusive education strengthens the need for the development of appropriate interventions. Over the past years, the use of technology in education has increased, and consequently also the number of technological interventions available for schools. Digital educational games have been introduced as a motivating way for children to learn due to the immediate feedback, an attractive narrative and interaction between the learner and the system. Empirical studies investigating the effectiveness of digital educational games have shown that these games can be more effective than traditional teaching methods in terms of cognitive gains. However, meta-analyses have argued that previous research often suffers from methodological issues. Besides, the evaluation is often narrow in the sense that only cognitive outcomes are assessed, ignoring effects on noncognitive and efficiency outcomes and how individual differences moderate the effect of digital games. Especially one specific characteristic of digital educational games has been proposed to be promising to take into account children's individual differences. Digital educational games with integrated adaptivity can modify the difficulty of the tasks to learners' needs. Therefore, the current PhD project aims to investigate the effectiveness of interventions targeting early numerical skills and reading skills and comprises five studies. First, to enlarge our understanding about previous intervention research, a meta-review was conducted on the effectiveness of math interventions (Chapter 2). The results revealed that digital technologies have potential to enable learning and to make learning more enjoyable. Informed by these results, a longitudinal, large-scale intervention study was conducted with the Number Sense Game (NSG) and the Reading Game (RG) in order to gain insights in children's cognitive and noncognitive outcomes as a result of a game-based training compared to 'business as usual' (Chapter 3). The results revealed that learning gains in terms of cognitive and noncognitive outcomes were limited. Therefore, a subsequent study was conducted to investigate the impact of an adaptive digital game-based intervention by comparing an adaptive version of the RG compared to a nonadaptive version of the RG and an active control group (Chapter 4). Again, the benefits of the integrated adaptivity on children's cognitive and noncognitive learning outcomes were modest. In a third intervention study, it was hypothesized that adaptive digital educational games would benefit children's efficiency outcomes rather than their cognitive and noncognitive outcomes. Therefore, the effects of an adaptive and nonadaptive version of the NSG on learners' cognitive, non-cognitive and efficiency learning outcomes was examined (Chapter 5). The results revealed that children needed less time in the adaptive condition compared to the nonadaptive condition to obtain the same learning goals. In a final study, a more detailed investigation of children's learning efficiency was carried out by analysing the log-data collected during gameplay (Chapter 6). The results indicated that children learnt more efficient in the adaptive compared to the nonadaptive game condition. These five studies are preceded by an introductory chapter (Chapter 1) and followed by a general discussion with the main conclusions and the theoretical, methodological, and educational implications of these five studies (Chapter 7).
Jaar van publicatie:2021
Toegankelijkheid:Open