LONDON, April 16 (Xinhua) -- Playing games in class may help university students achieve better grades, new research in the United Kingdom (UK) has revealed.
Including games in subjects such as economics and statistics leads to a significant drop in the number of students failing their courses, the research by the University of Warwick shows.
The research was carried out on two groups of students, with one group incorporating games into learning, while the other did not.
The study found that the group that included games in their work achieved significantly better grades, with the average exam score up by 7 percent.
Research leader Joshua Fullard, assistant professor of Warwick Business School, told Xinhua: "Traditional lecturing is not the best approach for learning, even in numbers-based subjects like economics or statistics."
The research showed that the rate of failure for students who played games was also lower, at only 7 percent, while in the other group almost a fifth of students failed.
"This suggests that games benefit all the students in the class, even those who do not get a higher grade, and the students who used games also had a much higher rate of student satisfaction, as well as higher attendance to lectures and seminars," the research report concluded.
However, some teachers and lecturers are reluctant to use games in their teaching due to the time pressure they face, the researchers found. Therefore, they suggested several short, easy-to-implement activities to improve student learning without educators sacrificing hours of teaching time. ■
