Session Information
16 SES 09B, Online Learning
Paper Session
Time:
2008-09-12
10:30-12:00
Room:
B4 416
Chair:
Hans van Gennip
Contribution
Internet has been used by educators as an effective tool to increase students’ motivation. According to Malone (1980), when a student is motivated, he/she will devote more time and energy to learn. Games have a number of advantagesfor learning environments (Alessi and Trollip, 2001). Educational games can play an important role in motivating the learners. Computer based educational games has emerged as the new approaches to support the learning procedure of students (Zavaleta et al., 2005). The main aim of this study was to identify the effects of web-based instructional materials, combined with educational games, on freshman students of a university. The research was based on two hypothesizes. The first one stated that; “there is no significant difference between the learning success of the students who are studying with web-based learning materials using the games directing to the course units and those who are not using the games”. The second hypothesis declared that “there is no significant difference between the learning permanency of the students who are studying with web-based learning materials using the games and those who are not using the games”. The research was done on the first year students attending “Computer Skills” course in Faculty of Commercial Sciences at Baskent University. Each of the test and control groups consisted of 25 students gathered by objective appointment method, from four groups of twelve course sections. The test group of the students studied the web-based learning materials including educational game, whereas the control group attended the same study without access to those game. That educational game was designed carefully considering critical factors of educational games. The results were analyzed by SPSS program and the mean and the standard deviation were established. Moreover, t- tests and covariance analysis were applied to measure the students’ success and permanency. Furthermore, students were asked to explain their ideas about web-based learning materials through an open ended question. Their ideas were brought together on the basis of their similarities into categories that differed from each other. The results showed that success and permanency of the students’ learnings obtained from web-based materials including games were significantly different than those materials without games. In addition, it was found that when the learning subjects of web-based materials became more advanced / difficult, learning materials including games were more effective based on student’s success. The descriptive results of open-ended question also showed that students considered learning materials including games, to be more attractive and interesting to study.
Expected Outcomes
Considering the results obtained from this study, educational games can effectively increase students’ success. It is recommended that when designing web-based learning materials, integration of appropriate educational games can be considered as a supportive learning process.
References
Alessi, S. M., and Trollip, S. R. (2001). Multimedia for Learning: Methods and Development. Pearson Education Company, Massachusetts. MALONE, T. W. (1980). What Makes Things Fun to Learn ? Heuristics for designing instructional computer games. Symposium on Small Systems. Palo Alto, CA: Xerox Research Center. p.162-169. ZAVALETA, J., COSTA, M., GOUVEA, M.T. and LIMA, C. (2005). Computer Games as a Teaching Strategy. Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’05). p.257-259.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.