Turning high-schools into laboratories? lessons learnt from studies of instructional effectiveness of digital games in the curricular schooling system

• Authors: Cyril Brom;Vít Šisler;Michaela Buchtová;Daniel Klement;David Levčík
• Venue: Edutainment'12/GameDays'12 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Edutainment, and Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on E-Learning and Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports
• Year: 2012

Digital games are believed by many to be instructionally effective in the context of the formal schooling system; however, studies investigating this idea empirically are limited and their outcomes are often inconclusive and/or difficult to interpret. Part of the problem is caused by the fact that when conducting a study in an authentic environment, i.e., in a school, as opposed to a laboratory, researchers encounter many common, yet unspoken, technical pitfalls. This paper verbalizes some of these pitfalls and organizes them into 6 Recommendations for "best practice" in field studies on the instructional effectiveness of digital game-based learning (DGBL). These recommendations are based on experience gained during five DGBL studies on more than 700 subjects in the context of secondary education and can be useful to other researchers willing to run similar studies.