The Effects of Individualized Feedback in Digital Educational Games

A crucial factor for successful digital educational games, particularly for older children and adolescents, is an appropriate balance; balance between learning and gaming and balance between challenge and ability. These factors are important to maintain fun, immersion, flow experience, and motivation – the motivation to play and therefore to learn. Moreover, it is important to realize a gaming experience that can compete with that of commercial, non-educational games. A special challenge in this context arises from the need for pedagogical support during learning and therefore during gaming. At many staves of the learning ladder, from a psych-pedagogical perspective, support and feedback is necessary in order to ensure successful, effective, and complacent learning. Considering the importance of not destroying immersion with the game, the assessment of the learning progress and psycho-pedagogical feedback must occur in a non-invasive way. This, however, requires an intelligent system that is capable of assessing individual competencies and learning progress by observing and interpreting the learner’s behaviour in the learning situations within the game. In ELEKTRA, a project funded by the European Commission and aiming at developing a sound psychopedagogical framework for immersive educational games, we developed a formal cognitive framework for the non-invasive assessment and interventions within complex learning situations, that is, micro adaptivity. Attuned to the assessed competencies or lack of competencies, meaningful feedback, for example hints, suggestions, reminders, critical questions, or praise, can be triggered, without destroying the gaming experience. Two questions arise with respect to feedback. First, does feedback, although designed to be non-invasive, on educational issues impair gaming experience? Second, can feedback in gaming situations facilitate the learning progress or does it increase the learner’s cognitive load, which was suggested be several researchers. In the context of the ELEKTRA project, we implemented the theoretical framework of micro adaptivity in the game demonstrator. This demonstrator is a state-of-the art 3D adventure game teaching physics in relation to national school curricula for the age group of 12 o 14 years. For evaluation purposes, log files of the gaming sessions were recorded and, in addition, questionnaires and performance tests were presented. In this work, we present results from an evaluation session. The results indicate that (micro) adaptive interventions (i.e., appropriate and meaningful interventions/feedback for an individual learner, his/her knowledge and learning progress) are superior to neutral (i.e., non-individualized but semantically correct interventions) and inappropriate interventions (i.e., non-individualized, unsuited interventions) in terms of learning and gaming measures. In addition, we analysed the relationships between learning progress and socio-emotional variables. The results indicate that adaptive feedback not only facilitates learning but also attitude and immersion.