Certain types of learning can benefit from digital play, but how to use that potential in the classroom remains a mystery.
When my kids, ages 11 and 8, come in through the back door after school, the first thing they say is, “Mom! “Could we play Prodigy?”
I agree after quickly calculating how much screen time they’ve already had for the week and how much peace and quiet I need to finish my work. Prodigy, after all, is a role-playing video game that encourages children to practice math facts. It’s instructive.
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“There is a lot of evidence that people, and not just young people,” says Richard Mayer, an education psychology researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It would be a worthwhile thing to do if we could turn that into something more productive.”
Mayer set out to evaluate rigorous experiments that tested what people can learn from games in an article published in the 2019 Annual Review of Psychology. Though he is not completely convinced of games’ educational potential, some studies have shown that they can be effective in teaching a second language, math, and science. He hopes to figure out how to harness any brain-boosting potential for improved classroom performance.
Your mind in games
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Your mind in games First-person shooter games provided some of the first evidence that gaming could train the brain. An undergraduate studying psychology at the University of Rochester in New York discovered that these much-maligned games may actually have benefits. C. Shawn Green gave his friends a visual attention test, and their results were astounding. He and his research supervisor, Daphné Bavelier, assumed there was a bug in his test coding. When Bavelier took the test, however, she scored within the normal range.
The difference was that Green’s friends had all been playing Team Fortress Classic, a first-person shooter version of capture the flag, for more than 10 hours per week. Green and Bavelier then rigorously tested the concept with novice gamers. They had two groups train on different types of games: one on a first-person shooter action game for one hour per day for ten days, and the other on Tetris, a spatial puzzle game.
According to Bavelier, who is now a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, action gamers are better able to switch their visual attention between distributed attention (scanning a large area for a specific object) and focused attention (extracting specific facts from a video). “This is known as attentional control, the ability to switch attention flexibly as time demands,” she explains.
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Though it is unclear whether improving this type of attention can help students in the classroom, Bavelier sees the potential for games to help motivate students — adding a bit of “chocolate” to the learning mix.
Green, now a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, admits that the benefits of playing hours upon hours of Call of Duty may be limited in real life. “There are some people who have jobs with a need for enhanced visual attention,” he says, “such as surgeons, law enforcement or the military.” But, he notes, all games come with an opportunity cost. “If video game time displaces homework time, that can affect reading and math skills negatively.”
Researchers discovered that gamers who practiced Tetris were better at mentally rotating two-dimensional shapes than those who played a control game. Students who played two hours of All You Can E.T., an educational game designed to improve the executive function of switching between tasks, outperformed students who played a word search game. Not surprisingly, the cognitive skills that games can improve are the ones that players end up practicing repeatedly during play.
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