| dc.description.abstract | Along with the development of globalization, English has become an important international language and the second language for many non-native English-speaking countries. However, the gap in language proficiency level of English learners is unlikely to make low achievers to develop the sense of achievement in current English learning environment. On the other hand, traditional teaching methods adopted by teachers may make students feel bored. Previous studies have pointed out that Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) have many advantages. For example, it allows learners to achieve learning goals via overcoming difficult challenges provided by digital games. DGBL can greatly influence student learning as it combines the characteristics of education and entertainment to stimulate students to have learning motivation.
DGBL is also applied to improve English learning in previous work. In particular, DGBL is widely used to help students learn English vocabulary. However, most of these previous works focused on a single aspect. Therefore, this study attempted to develop an English DGBL system (EDS), which was concerned with multiple aspects. Accordingly, this EDS consisted of one learning task and three game tasks. When undertaking the learning tasks, learners’ abilities in English logical thinking could be developed via identifying connections between each sentence. On the other hand, the gaming tasks was employed to help students recall English vocabulary presented in the learning task.
Nevertheless, DGBL still has some disadvantages. For example, learners might be addicted in entertainment elements provided by digital games. In addition, DGBL includes rich media, which might students experience cognitive overload. As a result of these s disadvantages, not all learners are suitable for DGBL. Furthermore, some empirical studies have also indicated that digital learning with gamified functions is not necessarily more effective than the learning approach without gamified functions. These differences might be caused by a fact that individual differences exist among all learners. In consequence, it is necessary to conduct empirical research from the perspective of individual differences.
Among various individual differences, gender is a relatively fixed and not malleable variable. Additionally, some studies indicated that gender differences would really affect learners’ learning attitude in DGBL. However, some studies found that gender differences were not influential. Therefore, there is a need to conduct further empirical studies to collect more evidence on how gender differences affect DGBL. To this end, an empirical study was conducted to investigate the effects of gender differences on the use of the EDS, in terms of learning preferences, learning performance, learning behavior and correlations among such variables.
The participants of this study were research students in a university in Taiwan. The results of this study indicated that males and females showed different reactions to the EDS. Regarding learning preferences, males more frequently used different types of hints than females. In particular, males used diverse tools to assist themselves while no such significant preferences were shown for females. Regarding learning performance, males obtained significant gain scores in the game task with corrective feedback while females did not demonstrate such a tendency. That is to say, males could benefit from the second-chance learning when their first answers were wrong while it might not be beneficial to females.
Regarding learning behavior, males preferred to move between giving answers and playing games. Conversely, females preferred to give answers first and then to play the game. Regarding correlations among such variables, the frequencies of males using the deletion method was significantly negatively correlated with answering efficiency and game scores, and was also significantly positively correlated with time spent for playing the digital game. These findings implied that males who were not willing to learn tended to take a guessing approach so that their performance could be negatively affected. In contrast, the frequencies of females using the vocabulary hint was significantly negatively correlated with game scores and answering efficiency. In other words, females without knowing sufficient vocabulary cannot benefit from DGBL.
In summary, this research contributes to develop the deep understandings of how to design DGBL that can be suitable for males and females. Moreover, such understandings could help researchers, teachers, students and designers have comprehensive understandings of the effects of gender differences. By doing so, gender differences can be minimized. | en_US |