The impact of video games on student's learning ability in classrooms

Previous research shows the negative effects of video games on students’ behavior or grades, they never focus on the positives impacts of video games. Research shows that video games help with learning skills as they involve many parts of the brain to work together to solve complex problems, promoting problem solving skills, although there is little empirical research regarding this. Role playing games also increase problem solving skills as they help them think of new strategies. Fast-paced games do not help with problem solving skills over time as they are two different entities and require different styles of being taken care of. The goal of the study was to examine whether strategic video game play predicted self-reported problem-solving skills among the sample of 1, 492 adolescents over the time of four high school years from Canada. There was parent consent involved in the study as it is something that will be analyzed later for the outcome. The measures taken were that all the participants were from grades 9-12, they also considered demographics such as sex, availability of computers, parental education, etc. Results showed that there is a relationship between playing strategic video games and self-reported problem-solving skills as well as academic grades. Some limitations to the study included was that their “ way of measuring sustained strategic and fast-paced game play was not occurring prior to changes over time”. Researchers should continue to investigate the relationship between video game play and problem-solving skills through experimental design to test causation between the two. This is a useful article as it talks about the relationship between video games and problem-solving strategies and that is important to understand as the many students are used to playing video games rather than going out. There are no biases in the study and prior research is done from academic resources making it reliable.

The authors conducted a study to investigate the correlation between game addiction and academic achievement. There were six different sample groups with a total of three hundred and seventy students from different high schools participated in this activity. The data was collected through an online questionnaire in which they explained their research to the participants. The questions they asked included simple demographic questions as well as game addiction scale (GAS) in which the participants would rank the amount of games they play. The questionnaire also included a question about their grade point average (GPA). There were two forms of the GAS 21-item and 7-item. The results showed that there was a correlation between game addiction and academic achievement, however it may be negligible. There were nine steps in the procedure of the study, including asking for permissions, adapting work, pre-testing, revisioning, emailing different high schools participating, questionnaires were formed and filled, and finally the collection and analysis of results was made. A weakness with the study would be that the researchers adapted the GAS from another origin and transferred it to Turkish, so they could use it for the people from the demographic location they choose as well as changing it grammatically to make it sound semantically valid, and later again changed it back to English for their questionnaire. Another weakness would be that the sample size of three hundred and seventy is not enough to generalize the results and say that it is true. The study also ignored the relationship between the individual, the environment, and games, other things such as family life, personal life school life should also be acknowledged. This helps researchers understand why students act the way they do, and how gaming is related to having better or worse grades as games help develop fast-paced cognitive thinking. There are no biases in this study as all background research is rooted from scholars.

The Journal of Online Education discusses how video games have gone from being social outcasts to be the rage of media, technology, and even educational industries such as the classroom. Online learning educators are thinking about building learning environments that involve video games. Educators want good online communities where the students can interact with one another safely and game designers can create virtual societies each with their own cultures, languages, and political systems. Only fifty percent of online courses get completed by students, when in gaming they can spend a lengthy number of hours mastering games while teaching other. The author states that online learning can be boring and dull whereas, games can be fun and engaging as well as immersive forcing the individual to think deeply using complex problem-solving skills. “ Research initiatives, conferences, books, and software focused on educational games suggests that computer and video games will have some part in education, just as all media before them have been used for learning”.

Looking at the history of educational technology suggests that educators can also abandon any form of media that does not seem fit for schooling. There is a comparative case study drawing on two cases where the computer game Civilization III was used for activities exploring world history. The sites chosen were because of convenience as organizations and institutions showed interest in using games as a way of teaching the students. The common concern for educators at both sites was finding experiences for kids who felt alienated from school. In the urban high school case, educators were looking for an alternative for students who had little interest in studying history and who did not necessarily believe the mandated, state-sanctioned history presented to them. In the after-school context, educators similarly sought to engage students to develop historical understandings as well as to become more affiliated with school-based learning in general. The challenge according to Squire is to change the cultures of schools to be organized around learning rather than the current norm of social control. This study shows how the way school works can change when games or online interactive media is put into the curriculum allowing the students to use their creative thinking skills, as well as memorizing and data retention skills. There are no biases in this study as it is based off of previous research and studies done by other scholars interested in this topic.

The article “ The relationship between video game use and a performance-based measure of persistence” states that the use of video games has both positive and negative effects on individual performances. This article was about a performance-based measure of persistence using anagrams and riddles. The way they measured the factors were by recording the time spent playing video games and then how long it takes to do solve hard problems and compare the two. The first hypothesis of the researchers was that there was a correlation between the time spent on unsolved trials will positively be related to a self-report measure of persistence and GPA. The second hypotheses the researchers have come up with is that the “ individuals who play video games frequently should have higher persistence compared to individuals who play less frequently or not at all”.

Middle school students who play video games are more open towards others while students who do not play video games are less open towards others. Video games also enhance creativity. The purpose of the study done was to see if previous studies were correct regarding the relationship between video games and persistence. Video games challenge the individual and it “ entails adjusting the optimal level of difficulty and is consistent with the theory of the zone of proximal development”. Their questions consisted of both easy and hard anagrams and riddles which were given to one hundred and two undergraduate students at the Florida State University. Both the hypotheses were confirmed at the end when the results were verified. Some limitations to this study would be that because it was a correlation study they cannot conclude that playing video games causes individuals to be persistent.