Search

Using simulations and games in education has risen sharply in the last decade, together with studies reporting on their learning effects. This article has three objectives: (a) to present the main features of simulations and games used for educational purposes as well as their hybrid forms; (b) to discuss how gamification can be employed to facilitate a transition from simulations to games; and (c) to outline some major findings and challenges underlined in the recent literature on the educational use of simulations and games with a focus on inquiry-based learning in science education.

Facilitating practice of time-management skills in education is imperative due to its impact on short and long term academic achievement. By bringing tacit processes into students' conscious awareness via visualizations, computer-based learning environments offer unique opportunities to enhance such practice. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of knowledge on how this impacts students' learning and time-management, especially when it comes to secondary vocational education. Therefore this study explores how visualizations of performance combined with guided reflection impact students' (N = 40) time management accuracy and their knowledge acquisition. Technical vocational students who worked in a computer-based learning environment that included a visualization of estimated time accuracy combined with guided reflection, were compared to students who worked in the same environment without this support. Results indicated that higher accuracy and learning gains align, that the added support may have induced an adaptation in time-management, but that learning was not affected.

Little is known about how design choices in teacher dashboards (i.e, digital tools that summarize and visualize information to support the teacher in the teaching process)impact teachers’ monitoring and interpretation of critical events. Therefore, this study examined how designs that offer different levels of supportimpactpre-serviceteachers’monitoring.Threedashboarddesigns(from least to most supported: mirroring, alerting, and advising) were compared. In three conditions teachers (n = 50) processed nine teacher dashboards of a particular design. Teachers were required to detect the critical situations in each dashboard. Results demonstrated that the alerting dashboards resulted in more successful problem detection than the mirroring dashboards. Though advising dashboards, in theory, offer more support, no additional benefit over alerting dashboards was found.

The challenge in serious games is to improve the effectiveness of learning by stimulating relevant cognitive processes. In this paper, we investigate the potential of surprise in two experiments with prevocational students in the domain of proportional reasoning. Surprise involves an emotional reaction, but it also serves a cognitive goal as it directs attention to explain why the surprise occurred and can play a key role in learning. In our experiments, surprises were triggered by a surprising event, ie, a nonplaying character who suddenly appeared and changed characteristics of a problem. In Experiment 1—comparing a surprise condition with a control condition—we found no overall differences, but the results suggested that surprise may be beneficial for higher level students. In Experiment 2, we combined Expectancy strength (Strong vs. Weak) with Surprise (Present vs. Absent) using higher level students. We found a marginal overall effect of surprising events on learning indicating that students who experienced surprises learned more than students who were not exposed to these surprises but we found a stronger effect of surprise when we included existing proportional reasoning skill as factor. These results provide some evidence that a narrative technique as surprise can be used in game-based learning for the purpose of learning.

This dissertation focused on evaluating game-based learning in prevocational education. Though many researchers seem convinced of the potential of game-based learning, researchers also acknowledge that the empirical evidence for games as learning tools is ambiguous. Comparison between studies is difficult due to diversity in content, gameplay, and population (among other things). To distinguish between effective and ineffective practices and elements, and to optimize game-based learning, value-added comparison studies are required. Therefore, studies in the current dissertation adopted a value-added approach: a standard version of the game (i.e., an educational math game ‘Zeldenrust’) was compared to versions that were enhanced with different forms of instructional support (i.e., self-explanation prompts, collaboration, and faded worked examples). Three consecutive empirical studies investigated the effect of these forms of instructional support on the in-game performance and knowledge acquisition of prevocational students. It is important to highlight the outcome that learning was significantly enhanced in all three studies. The overall pretest to posttest Cohen’s d effect sizes for studies 1, 2, and 3 were 0.44, 0.46, and 0.46 respectively, which are regarded as medium-sized effects. These findings show that the intervention involving the educational game ‘Zeldenrust’ formed a solid foundation for learning about the domain of proportional reasoning. The results of the three studies show that further improvement of this environment was difficult, but possible. The investigated implementations of self-explanation prompts and collaboration did not result in improved effectiveness, but the addition of faded worked examples did. This seems to suggest that prevocational students benefit from continuous support that contains expert advice. Though game designers show a tendency to hide the instructional component and educational content in educational games, results of the current line of study suggest that a formal representation of the educational content in the game-environment could support students gameplay and learning.

Game-based learning is often considered to be an effective instructional approach, but the effects of game-based learning are varied and far from optimal. Aside from many features and characteristics that might affect the results of game-based learning, we conjecture that games generally thrive on experiential learning and that experiential learning does increase knowledge, but that this knowledge is often implicit. We note that though implicit knowledge is certainly valuable, that in general explicit knowledge is considered more desirable in education, because it is more accessible and promotes transfer. It is suggested that explicit knowledge does not always automatically follow from the development of implicit knowledge, but that this process can be supported through self-explanations. Because self-explanations rarely occur automatically in game-based learning environments, we propose that self-explanations in game-based learning environments can be elicited by specific instructional approaches. Three possible approaches for eliciting self-explanations are discussed: question prompts, collaboration, and partial worked examples.

Reviews regarding serious games show that the effect on learning can be qualified as moderately positive. Despite the active involvement of players it seems that they sometimes refrain from relevant cognitive processes during game play. This study addresses a technique involving the generation of manageable cognitive conflicts to stimulate these cognitive processes. Surprise comprises events that undermine an expectation which trigger players to evaluate the new situation more extensively. Participants (N = 94) played a game in which they practiced proportional reasoning skills. The pretestposttest design involved two factors: Surprise (surprise vs. no surprise) and Expectancy (strong vs. weak). Surprise was implemented as an appearing game character that modified some parameters of a problem while the player was solving that problem. We expected that this would prompt players to evaluate their solution strategy and decide whether another strategy was more appropriate. Expectancy pertains to the type of problems that players expect. In the strong expectancy version players received a series of problems with the same structure as before. In the weak expectancy version problems with different structures are randomly presented to the players and each problem may involve a different solution strategy. We hypothesized an interaction between Surprise and Expectancy, next to a main effect of Surprise. The results show that participants learned from the game. We also did find a weak positive effect of Surprise, but no effect of Expectancy nor interaction effect on learning. The facilitating effect of Surprise was stronger when existing proportional reasoning skill was included as factor. These results indicate that surprise as implemented in the game has effect on learning regardless whether expectancy was weak or strong. We discuss some suggestions for finding stronger effects of surprise such as the fact that the repetitive nature may have weakened the 'surprisingness' of the surprises and the observation that our sample may not have possessed a sufficient level of metacognitive skills to interpret the changes caused by the surprises.

In this study we focus on the integration of mathematical learning content (i.e. proportional reasoning) in a GBLE. More specific two kinds of GBLEs are set up; an extrinsically integrated GBLE and an intrinsically integrated GBLE. In the former environment, the mathematical content is not part of the core mechanics and structure of the gaming world. In the latter environment, the mathematical content is delivered through the parts of the game that are the most fun to play and embodied within the structure of the gaming world and the players interactions with it. Fifty-eight vocational track students participated in the study, all working in one of the two versions of the self-developed game-based learning environment ‘Zeldenrust’. The results of this study provide evidence for the effect of this different way of implementing learning content in an educational math game. More specific, students playing in an extrinsically integrated game show higher learning gains, motivational gains and perceived usefulness than students who played with a game in which the content was intrinsically integrated

In Game Based Learning (GBL) environments addition, players act and see how the system responds, which may lead to intuitive learning. GBL learning lacks the deep and integrated structure that is characteristic for sustainable knowledge. Cognition-based instructional scaffolds and support may facilitate the acquisition of sustainable knowledge in GBL environments. How can we implement such support effectively without hampering the motivating character of the GBL environment? We introduce a game that implements two cognition-based principles in an integrated way. First, Integration, suggests that cognitive activities used for game play also improve the learning of arithmetic and enhance intrinsic motivation. Second, Reflection, enables players to explicate their knowledge. In a pilot study, we tested a basic version of the game and measurement instruments (using only Integration). Motivation and perception questionnaires proved to be reliable (N = 81). However, a small-scale pretest-posttest group showed no increase in performance after playing the game (p > .05). After revisions, 3 additional game versions were created: a structured reflection version (information about math problem solving strategies and then reflection prompts), an open reflection version (only reflection prompts) and an information-only version (information about math problem solving strategies). Currently pretest-posttest experiments are testing the hypothesis that the combination of Integration with Structured Reflection will outperform the other conditions on performance.