15-20 Minute Paper
Brock Dubbels
Doctoral researcher
McMaster University
Biography
Brock Dubbels is currently a post-‐doctoral researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His appointment includes work on game design in the Dept. of Computing and Software (G-‐Scale) as a CLIR Fellow.
Abstract
A comparative empirical media study with games, video, and printed text. This presentation will emphasize the use of games as new narratives and touch upon several of the conference themes, but focus specifically on the idea of new stories for new screens, and how and why they might be used in instruction. The presentation will address the question: “Are video games more effective than other media when providing the same or similar content for comprehension and problem solving?”
Analysis of the experiment showed statistically superior performance by the video game:
- Study participants built more robust mental representations (situation models).
- Participants were significantly more successful in correctly answering multiple-choice questions
- There was also significantly better performance when solving a word problem
- When the Print Text condition followed either the game or the video, participants demonstrated significantly better performance reading and comprehending the text if it followed exposure to the video game
In summary, participants performed significantly better in the video game condition than to performance than the video or text conditions. The data will be contextualized with best practices for complementing traditional instruction with new media such as video games.