Effects of Serious Games on Student Engagement, Motivation, Learning Strategies, Cognition, and Enjoyment

Introduction

An educational or serious game was defined as “an instructional method requiring the learner to participate in a competitive activity with preset rules” (Akl et al., 2010). Examples are “exergaming” game, Yourself!Fitness, and the biofeedback game (Michael & Chen, 2006). There have been many studies committed to the exploration of student engagement, motivation, learning strategies, cognition, and enjoyment of serious games. Most of them reported positive educational outcomes. For example, serious games have been deemed as an effective tool to engage students with various needs and expectations (Yu, 2019). Compared with traditional pedagogy, serious game-assisted teaching could cause higher engagement in and positive attitude toward learning (Varvara, Michail, & Konstantinos, 2016). The level of engagement in a serious game could predict learning outcomes (Volejnikova-Wenger et al., 2021).

Numerous studies have examined the effects of serious games in various fields. Some of them have reported that serious games were beneficial to medical education in terms of student satisfaction, knowledge acquisition, skill training, attitude, and learning behaviors (Akl, Pretorius, Sackett, & Erdley, et al., 2010). Serious games could enhance the effectiveness of instruction in business institutes and construction education (Tagliabue et al., 2021). Other studies have been committed to influencing factors of the acceptance of serious games although the influence of the factors on student performance has not been thoroughly explored (e.g. Giannakos, 2013; Yu & Yi, 2020).

However, it is also reported that the use of serious games has been proven either effective or ineffective in the medical field. Little is known about the mixed effects of serious games on different variables in various fields. More comprehensive review studies are still needed to test the effectiveness of serious games in medical education and other fields (Akl et al., 2010). Given the contradictory findings, it is meaningful and important to systematically review the effect of serious games in various fields to provide a solid reference for future researchers and practitioners. This study aims to answer several research questions as follows:

• (1)

  What are major clusters, citation counts, burst detection, centrality, sigma, and co-occurrence in serious game-assisted education research? Burst detection aims to identify the frequency of words or phrases used in cited documents, and the citation frequency of the cited documents. It may indicate the development direction of the theme. The results obtained by the sudden increasing algorithm can identify the changing trend of the theme in time. Centrality describes that a node establishes a bridge between two unrelated nodes, and the high centrality highlights the importance of nodes in the structure. Sigma value is a composite of two indicators, i.e. centrality and burst values. It is used to identify innovative literature. This indicator can be used to identify innovative topics. Co-occurrence is a quantitative analysis method in various information carriers. It can reveal the content correlation of information and the implied co-occurrence relationship of featured items.

• (2)

  How can serious games improve student engagement, motivation, learning strategies, and cognition?

• (3)

  How can serious games enhance enjoyment, happiness, intention to use, positive attitude, and satisfaction of students?

• (4)

  How can serious games improve learning outcomes, e.g. health education effectiveness, understanding, gain and sharing of knowledge and information, decision-making, flow experience, mental effort, and higher-order abilities?

• (5)

  What are recently developed serious games and how about their effects?