Digital game-based learning in secondary education

This PhD thesis presents research on digital game-based learning in secondary education. The main research question is: How do digital games contribute to learning, engagement and motivation to learn?
The thesis contains seven chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to digital game-based learning and shows the scope of the thesis. Chapter two presents a literature review (study 1). Chapter three describes the results of the first field study on playing games in education to show the motivational and learning effects of DGBL on students (study 2). Chapter four presents the results of the second field study on playing games in an educational setting. The aim of this study was to investigate whether students’ game activities could explain the differences among students’ motivation to learn the subject of debt, their perceived learning outcomes and their team game performance (study 3). Chapter five presents the results of a third field study, where students were required students to create games in an educational setting (study 4). The aim of this study was to investigate how teachers use game creation in their teaching practice and whether creating games affects students’ classroom motivation and their perceived learning outcomes. Chapter six reports the results of an interview study with teachers, which investigated teachers’ practice-based perceptions of the value of digital games (study 5). Finally, chapter seven summarizes the main results of the five studies and discussed the contributions of this research to DGBL.