Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 114, November 2017, Pages 175-192
Computers & Education

Digital games-based learning for children with dyslexia: A social constructivist perspective on engagement and learning during group game-play

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.06.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Group game play of drill and practice games is driven by social engagement.

  • Social engagement is expressed through ‘game talk’.

  • ‘Game talk’ can strengthen the self-esteem of children with dyslexia.

  • ‘Game talk’ can reveal learning processes offering intervention opportunities.

  • A sense of ownership of personalised games can inhibit collaboration.

Abstract

Taking a process-orientated, social constructivist lens, we examine the case of a digital game called Words Matter. The game was designed for children with dyslexia and was informed by principles from casual games and evidence-based practice from special education. Focusing on the game play of two groups of children, we employ a systematic thematic analytic approach on videos of children's verbal and non-verbal interaction triangulated with their game logs, concentrating on the nature of student-student as well as student-tutor social interactions. Our findings show that children spontaneously engage in ‘game talk’ regarding game performance, content, actions and experiences. While this game talk facilitates a strong sense of social engagement and playfulness, it also caters to a variety of new opportunities for learning by sparking tutor and student-initiated interventions. Alongside its social theoretical lens on digital games-based learning, the paper analyses game-based social interactions in tandem with game design decisions enabling additional implications to be drawn for pedagogical practice and game design.

Introduction

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that, it is argued, impacts between 4 and 8% of children in the UK primarily affecting the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling (Rose, 2009). As children with dyslexia become aware that their difficulties set them apart from their peers, their willingness to engage in literacy often decreases (Zisimopoulos & Galanaki, 2009). Since interest in an activity can foster intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1992), teachers seek to understand children's interests and embed them within evidence-based explicit and systematic literacy teaching aimed at developing children's strategies for tackling word level difficulties (Gooch et al., 2016, Griffiths and Morag, 2011, Shaywitz et al., 2008).

Alongside these established non-digital pedagogies, drill and practice digital games-based learning (DGBL) has emerged as a promising additional approach to address children's motivational barriers because games offer a socially valued medium. A recent study by Holmes (2011) set in the context of children's family homes showed that drill and practice DGBL boosted the children's engagement with the literacy activities, fostered skill reinforcement and enhanced their perception of their reading progress. Nonetheless, the use of the games did not come without challenges. The requirement to choose appropriate games in the child's zone of proximal development, alongside the importance of ensuring that the learning task was kept structured and clear, meant that a delicate balance needed to be met between children's independent play and parental guidance.

The study by Holmes highlights the potential benefits of drill and practice DGBL for children with dyslexia whilst it also supports previous findings in the learning sciences showing that social interactions are critical in learning (e.g. Littleton, 2010, Webb, 2010, Vygotsky, 1978). In doing so, it cautions against a view of DGBL research that only prioritises the quantification of learning gains (i.e. an outcomes-orientated approach) to one that additionally seeks to understand the nuances of how digital games, specific digital game features and digital games-based social interaction can foster and shape such outcomes (i.e. a process-orientated approach).

In accordance with this perspective, the present research adopts a social constructivist, process-orientated lens on the use of drill and practice DGBL by children with dyslexia. The game under examination, Words Matter, marries design features from casual and social games with evidence-based practice from special education. An exploratory study is conducted in a school setting during which groups of children with dyslexia, occasionally removed from their school class to receive group intervention by an expert tutor because of their persistent difficulties (Rose, 2009), played the game. The goal of the research is to examine the kind of situated social interactions occurring between students, and between students and their tutors, in the context of game play focusing on how they shape engagement and learning – two key psychological constructs that have intensely occupied games researchers (e.g. Cagiltay et al., 2015, Connolly et al., 2012, Iacovides et al., 2015, Kenny and Gunter, 2007).

This research contributes in three ways. First, it facilitates the development of a new theoretical understanding of DGBL that shows how complex forms of social interaction sparked by games can foster diverse opportunities for engagement and learning shaping the form, function and interaction between these constructs. For instance, we find that engagement can sometimes deter the generalization of skills. Driven by engagement, children of our study tended to play a smaller set of learning activities, i.e. particular mini games, instead of practicing and transferring their skills to the diverse set of available mini games. Second, in capturing how social construction (including cultural, social, and pedagogical forces) affects engagement and learning, the study offers insights on how to design engineered forms of digital games-based social interaction. An example of this comes from the observation that children collaborating during game play tended to voice aloud their learning processes to each other, as a result inviting emergent peer tutoring opportunities where knowledgeable others subtly suggested more optimal game strategies. Third, we identify opportunities for DGBL design as well as challenges. For example, while we show how design can encourage external error attributions that may serve to strengthen children's self-esteem, we also identify the challenges involved in designing open learner models of game performance that will concurrently engage and foster learning.

The following section presents the foundation of our work, first by qualifying the choice of a DGBL pedagogy for students with special education needs and by examining the need to apply a social constructivist lens on DGBL. Next, we report the findings of our case studies in the use of our DGBL intervention, during which we video recorded two groups of children over the course of three game play sessions in order to analyse their verbal and non-verbal communication in combination with their game play. Finally, we connect our process-orientated findings to previous theoretical work in order to show how our social lens contributes to the broader academic field of DGBL.

Section snippets

Games-based pedagogies for students with special education needs

During the past decade, much debate has centred on how digital games foster learning. Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2007) takes an historical view to show that behaviourist modes of learning underpinned early game genres (e.g. memory games such as Math Blaster!) as their mechanics reinforced knowledge while rewarding learners. This gave way to cognitivist learning theories whereby the learner's abilities and skills became the focal point. Intelligent adaptive games provided a way to detect and respond to

Research approach

Our research adopts a qualitative exploratory case study approach. Case study research is particularly relevant when the researcher's aim is to understand a social phenomenon in context where there is little control over the events (Yin, 2003). Stake (2003) defines two types of case studies: intrinsic and instrumental. Whereas intrinsic is concerned with obtaining a rich understanding of a particular situation, instrumental seeks to establish ‘analytic generalizability’ where the research

Social engagement – reshaping individual game play into a social activity

Given the nature of our game, children were not always playing the same mini game at the same time. Children strategically used their individual game experiences to express their individuality and provoke the social curiosity of their peers. They drew attention to themselves by verbalizing interesting, unexpected game events anchored in the game's fantasy narrative. Other children would then get drawn into the experience of their neighbour briefly pausing their own game play to observe the

Conclusion

The learning games community has been historically divided on whether there is a place for drill and practice approaches to learning, and whether this makes for a “good” game. In this paper, we have taken a more nuanced approach to argue that the kind of learning privileged in drill and practice games can particularly benefit skills development for certain types of learners such as children with dyslexia. At the same time, a dominant trend in the field of DGBL has been to conduct quantitative

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the ILearnRW (project no: 318803) FP7 ICT EU project and iRead (project no: 731724) H2020 Innovation Action EU Project.

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