‘Yay, you got it right’: challenging the reliance on verification feedback in games-based learning

Coach House, School of Education, 4-5pm

You are warmly invited to the second Leeds Centre for Interdisciplinary Childhood and Youth Research (L-CYR) Autumn seminar Dr Asimina Vasalou and Dr Laura Benton (both UCL Knowledge Lab) will lead the seminar.Games-based learning (GBL) is often endorsed for the ability to deliver in-the-moment pedagogical feedback. Feedback is one of the most powerful pedagogical interventions for raising student achievement. Yet, the literature shows that its impact highly depends on how it is delivered, an observation that extends to GBL and how games are designed.
In this talk we will focus on games for early literacy learning targeted at young or struggling learners. We will report on a recent empirical study of a literacy game developed as part of the iLearnRW project, that employed verification feedback informing the player about whether they succeeded or failed. We focus on the social interaction around the game to show how children drew on different forms of support and which support was most effective. Building on this we will also present initial findings from our current work on the iRead project, in which we have undertaken an analysis of the approach to feedback design taken by existing popular commercial literacy games, and through which we identify new opportunities for design and research.
Refreshments provided