Serious games might lead to serious educational gains

I have been just a little skeptical of educational digital games. I can imagine how students might learn from them, but I have not been convinced they are so much more effective than other, less-resource intensive forms of education. (I mean, good video games cost a lot of money to make.) But, a new meta-analysis in Review of Educational Research has me reconsidering my stance. Barz et al. (2024) did a meta-analysis of digital game-based interventions, focusing on "high-quality" studies involving a true control group, published from 2015-2020, and involving K-12 students. They found a pretty sizable average effect (g = .54) of those games on recall and understanding of conceptual or domain-specific knowledge. They didn't find any practically significant moderators of the overall effect, which was somewhat surprising. They did look at other outcomes like motivation and metacognition, but I don't think there were enough studies focusing on those outcomes to take too much from those findings. Nonetheless, I found the effects on cognitive outcomes sufficiently strong to rethink my skepticism, and the authors put forth some plausible explanations for why digital games might have such effects (e.g., a safe space for students to "fail", possible personalization effects in terms of calibrating game difficulty to performance, etc.). So, consider me intrigued. But please don't make these educational digital games like those first-person video games - they make this aging gamer nauseous!