Video games in teacher training

Abstract

The aim of this work is an overview of the doctoral thesis called Video games in teacher training: design, implementation and evaluation of an educational proposal, that is being written by Marta Martin del Pozo and supervised by Ana Garcia-Valcarcel Munoz-Repiso and Azucena Hernandez Martin. The main objectives of the thesis are the following ones: to know and to analyse the primary school teachers' (in service) attitudes and the future primary school teachers' (at initial training) attitudes towards collaborative learning with video games; to design, implement and assess an educational proposal about collaborative learning with video games for the future primary school teachers (at initial training), including the use of video games and the creation of video games with software that is not necessary to have previous programming knowledge. In terms of methodology, our research is divided into two studies to reach the two main objectives. On the one hand, to reach the first objective, we chose an ex post facto approach. On the other hand, the second study, related to the other objectives, is inside of program evaluation methodologies. In particular, we chose a pretest-postest design with an only group. The instruments to collect data in the studies are an attitude scale towards collaborative learning with video games, a knowledge test about collaborative learning with video games, an assessment questionnaire about the educational proposal and a rubric to assess the video games created by the future primary school teachers. Finally, regarding the results achieved until now, we created and validated the scale and we are going to validate the knowledge test. Furthermore, we designed the educational proposal and we are looking for students to be the sample and to participate in the implementation of the proposal.