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Educational games and students’ game engagement in elementary school classrooms

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Abstract

The main goal of this paper was to examine middle school students’ game engagement and its effect on math performance. For the game, we developed [Math App], an educational video game intended to support students’ understanding of fractions. Using [Math App] in a quasi-experimental research setting, we collected data on game engagement, game features, the perception of game learning ability, gender, and the amount of gameplay, and math performance. Our structural equation modeling analysis revealed that game engagement was categorized into two subdomains of behavioral and emotional/cognitive engagement. We also found that students’ game engagements were associated with student’s perception of gaming ability and in turn, it displayed a significant path with game features.

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Acknowledgements

This manuscript is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. DRL-1118571. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. Mido Chang was a co-principal investigator of the funded project by the NSF. Sunha Kim was the recipient of graduate assistantship of the project and later served on the grant as a consultant.

Funding

The authors of Mido Chang, Michael A. Evans, Kirby Deater-Deckard, and Anderson Norton were the principal and co-principal investigators of the funded project by the NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Counseling, School, & Educational Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo, 423 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY, 14260-1000, USA

    Sunha Kim

  2. Department of Leadership & Professional Studies, College of Education, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Mido Chang

  3. Department of Psychology & Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Kirby Deater-Deckard

  4. Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Counselor Education, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Michael A. Evans

  5. Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Anderson Norton

  6. Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technologies, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Yavuz Samur

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  1. Sunha Kim
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Correspondence to Sunha Kim.

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The research has been conducted by collecting data from 5th and 8th grade students after the research team obtained the necessary approvals of Virginia Tech Institutional Review Board (FWA00000572) and Florida International University Institutional Review Board (IRB-13-0219), the consent form from parents, and the assent form from students.

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Kim, S., Chang, M., Deater-Deckard, K. et al. Educational games and students’ game engagement in elementary school classrooms. J. Comput. Educ. 4, 395–418 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-017-0095-4

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