The impact of a digital educational video game on academic achievement, multidimensional engagement, and disengagement in three distinct biology undergraduate course contexts
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite extensive research demonstrating the effectiveness of digital educational games in enhancing various learning outcomes, skepticism persists regarding their practical applicability in diverse educational settings. This study addresses a significant gap in literature by providing an empirical evaluation of a cellular biology educational game in post-secondary biology instruction across varied delivery contexts. The tower defense game, Life on the Edge, was assessed for impacts on academic achievement, multidimensional engagement, and disengagement after controlling learner factors (perceived prior knowledge, goal orientations, and game experience) in different biology undergraduate course contexts (online and face-to-face lecture and laboratory) at a Canadian public university. Nine hundred seventy-four students participated in the study, of which 449 were in experimental groups using the game, and 525 were in control groups using alternative learning resources. We conducted a t-test and found no significant differences in academic achievement within the three-course contexts. However, multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) showed that integrating the game in different course contexts improved behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement while reducing behavioral disengagement. This study provides empirical evidence of the engagement benefits of integrating educational video games into diverse course contexts. However, cognitive and emotional disengagement effects were inconsistent across these settings, highlighting the complexity of learner-game interactions. These results underscore the need for tailored implementation strategies to optimize the impact of digital games in education. By bridging research and practice, the study contributes to the theoretical understanding of game-based engagement and practical approaches for integrating educational games into post-secondary curricula.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it