Effects of a formative assessment-based contextual gaming approach on students’ digital citizenship behaviours, learning motivations, and perceptions

Abstract

Several previous studies have indicated that secondary school students face problems in digital situations. Digital citizenship is therefore an essential conception for fostering students' correct behaviour and safe daily life habits while using computer and communication technologies. However, scholars have indicated the challenges of promoting students' digital citizenship owing to the lack of opportunities to situate them in decision-making situations. The advancement of computer and multimedia technologies has encouraged an increasing number of studies on digital game-based learning, which provides students with opportunities to experience various situations, and to cope with problems encountered in daily life. Several previous studies have indicated that digital game-based learning environments with proper learning strategies might help students realize the importance and meaning of digital citizenship. To address this issue, this study proposes a formative assessment-based contextual gaming approach to guide students to make decisions and to monitor their learning during the gaming process. A digital game-based learning environment was developed based on this approach, and a quasi-experiment on the digital citizenship topic was conducted in northern Thailand to evaluate its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the proposed approach not only enhanced the students’ digital citizenship behaviours, but also promoted their motivations and perceptions.