I Don’t Usually Listen, I Read: How Different Learner Groups Process Game Feedback

I Don’t Usually Listen, I Read: How Different Learner Groups Process Game Feedback

I Don’t Usually Listen, I Read: How Different Learner Groups Process Game Feedback

Andrea Gauthier, Laura Benton, Leona Bunting, Elisabeth Herbert, Emma Sumner, Manolis Mavrikis, Andrea Révész, Asimina Vasalou

Abstract

"Outcome and elaborative feedback in games can scaffold learn-ers to recognise errors and apply corrective strategies. However, there is little evidence that indicates how children process such feedback. Using an active intervention approach, this study empiri-cally evaluated how three groups of primary-aged children with different profiles—novice readers, children with reading difficulties, and children learning English as a foreign language—attended to, understood, and acted upon feedback within a digital literacy game. Children’s gameplay and verbalisations across groups were com- pared through systematic video analysis. Our findings demonstrate that all readers benefited from visual, non-verbal outcome feedback, which supported accurate interpretations of their performance, but groups attended to it differentially. Older children noticed audi-tory, verbal elaborative feedback more than novice readers, but all children struggled to understand it, instead relying on implicit knowledge to correct future responses. We conclude by highlight- ing several contributions to games-based learning research, game design, and pedagogical practice."

Reference

Gauthier, A., Benton, L., Bunting, L., Herbert, E., Sumner, E., Mavrikis, M., Révész, A., & Vasalou, A. (2022). I don’t usually listen, I read: How different learner groups process game feedback. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI EA '22). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517480

Keywords

Learning Games, Game Design, Feedback