Secondary School Students’ Cognitive Structures Regarding Educational Games

To employ educational games in education as intended, it is required to show students’ cognitive structures for this concept. As a result, the purpose of this research was to reveal the cognitive structures of secondary school students regarding educational games. The research was a survey-based descriptive study. A total of 340 secondary school students were included for this research, which included fifth graders (n=80), sixth graders (n=95), seventh graders (n=69), and eighth graders (n=96). Simple random sampling was used to choose the participants. Data were gathered using the Word Association Test (WAT) and a drawing test. Six categories are used to organize the students' responses to the educational game's concept. ‘Individual gains,’ ‘lessons,’ ‘sports,’ ‘lesson tools/applications,’ ‘games,’ and ‘features of games’ were all of these. Four categories were used to categorize the drawings made by the students to represent the concept of educational games: ‘physical ability games,’ ‘intelligent and strategy games,’ ‘puzzle,’ and ‘mixed games.’ As a result of this research, it is possible to conclude that students’ cognitive structures for the concept of educational games include games played in classes, and educational games highlight the game aspect more. Besides that, there was little vocabulary diversity in their cognitive structures for the educational dimension. To enhance students' cognitive structures toward educational games, focus should be given to the instructional feature of educational games in research to be undertaken in the relevant field.