A Meta-Analysis of Use of Serious Games in Education over a Decade

Table 1

A summary of influencing factors, positive and negative findings.

Items	Findings
Influencing factors	(1) Perceived usefulness of the game and the interaction of students with colleagues [4]; (2) Goals and ease of use [5]; (3) Relationships between learning attributes and gaming mechanics [6]; (4) Backstory and production, realism, artificial intelligence and adaptivity, interaction, and feedback and debriefing [7]; (5) Gaming easiness and instruction [8]; Surprises [9, 10]; (6) Instructional content, game dimensions, game cycle, debriefing, perceived educational value, transfer of learnt skills and intrinsic motivation [11]; (7) Types of serious games and age of learners [1]; (8) Games with different features [12].
Positive findings	Serious games were reported effective to: (1) facilitate learners' holistic understanding of scientific conceptions [7],; (2) obtain cognitive abilities,; (3) increase positive affect of learning and improve teaching in the sciences [14],; (4) provide flexible learning [15],; (5) improve learning outcomes [16],; (6) facilitate socio-cultural learning in terms of cognitive and motivational effects [21] and team opinions [17],; (7) improve cross cultural communication competence [11],; (8) improve script collaboration based professional learning and learner satisfaction [18].
Negative findings	(1) The nature of serious games negatively influenced the relationship between mental workload and learning effect [22].; (2) No significant differences in in-depth learning were found among learners [23].; (3) Some serious games aggravated the mental workload and decreased the learning effectiveness [24].