The effect of digital game-based learning on secondary level students’ learning of Internet literacy

Since the effectiveness of pedagogies relies heavily on the context they are practiced, scholars strive to revalidate them with different participants representing different disciplines, age, cultures and so on. In this regard, this piece of work was undertaken so as to reveal the impact of a digital game-based learning environment on the achievement of secondary school participants in the topic of Internet literacy in Turkey. To this end, a three dimensional multi-user digital game-based learning environment through Active Worlds game engine was created. The static-group pre-test post-test design was adopted. We recruited 266 students attending 10th-grade at a public high school. The participants were block-randomized to the groups. The control group partook in a lecture-based learning environment for two weeks, whereas the experimental group learned with a digital game-based learning environment. The results ascertained that even though there were significant learning gains in control as well as experimental groups, no substantial significant difference was observed in the achievement across the groups. The results illustrated that the interaction of method and gender had no influence on the achievement. Particularities of the context of the study causing the results and study’s far-reaching implications were discussed.