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Many people are highly engaged with and frequently play video and computer games. World-wide, more than 2.6 billion people play video or computer games (Gilbert, 2021) and every day more and more people are playing. For instance, the NPD Group (NPD, 2019) reports that from 2018 to 2019 there was a 6% increase in people playing computer-based games. Young people are particularly engaged in digital game play. Based on Lobel et al. (2017), children from 7-12 years old play computer-based games approximately 5 hours per week, while Homer and colleagues (2012) reported much larger numbers of weekly hours of digital play by young people.
Due to their appeal, especially to young people, digital games have the potential to be powerful tools for learning. However, researchers and educators have questioned whether all students learn equally well from digital learning games, given that there are differences in their typical game preferences (Dindar, 2018; Phan et al., 2012) and boys tend to spend more time playing (Homer et al., 2012). Yet, digital learning games have been shown to be effective for girls -- and often more effective than for boys -- in terms of both learning and affective outcomes (Arroyo et al., 2014; Hou et al., 2020, 2022; McLaren, Farzan et al., 2017b).
Although meta-analyses reveal gender similarities in math achievement (Hyde et al., 2008; Lindberg et al., 2010), gender differences favoring boys still emerge when focusing on data representing top performers among students or in advanced areas of math (Breda et al., 2018; Wai et al., 2010). Critically, girls tend to report less positive math affect (Ganley & Lubienski, 2016; Hill et al., 2016), which in turn predicts their STEM engagement, goals, and achievement (Deemer et al., 2014; Else-Quest et al., 2013). Given how they often engage young people, digital learning games seem to be particularly well suited to address affective experiences with math, giving them potential to serve as a useful instructional tool for girls in particular.
Unfortunately, digital game designers often work without empirical guidance for how to make learning games more effective, especially in how games differ in their support of girls versus boys. In some cases, this results in uninformed adoption of extrinsic rewards (referred to as “gamification”), such as points, badges, competition and levels, that often do not foster productive learning processes (Nicholson, 2012, 2013; Seaborn & Fels, 2015). In its attempts to reach more young girls, the game industry too often has employed gender stereotypes without a clear understanding of gender-based preferences or outcomes (Everett et al., 2017; Shaw, 2015). Greater evidence of when and how male and female students learn from digital learning games -- and especially how they might learn differently from games -- will help inform teachers’ choices about which digital learning games to incorporate into their teaching and how to enhance learning for all students.