A multidimensional evaluation of the effectiveness of adaptive digital educational games

Digital educational games with integrated adaptivity can modify the difficulty of the tasks to learners’ needs. These adaptive digital educational games are promising because they can take into account children’s individual differences. 

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. 

The overarching aim of the studies included in the doctoral dissertation was to investigate the effectiveness of adaptive digital educational games. This overarching aim was addressed with five studies which focused on the development of early numerical and reading skills. These are two important goals in pre-school and the early years of primary education. 

In this seminar, Stefanie will analyse three intervention studies which investigated the effectiveness of an adaptive maths and reading game, and a final study consisting of a more detailed investigation of children’s learning efficiency by analysing the log-data collected during gameplay.

This event will be particularly useful for those interested in digital education games, numerical skills, reading skills, primary education and intervention studies.

N.B. This is a hybrid event and can be joined either virtually or in-person and you can indicate this on the registration form.

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