What is Learning Gains

The exponential growth of technology is transforming most existing sectors in the world. One of the technologies that is significantly impacting our society is video games, which have become a new cultural form of expression. Moreover, research suggests that, especially within educational contexts, they present great learning opportunities. However, little is known in serious games about the interplay of the in-game activity, learning gains, and enjoyment with the game. Therefore, in this chapter, the authors use data from a pilot study conducted with a STEM inquiry-learning serious game to compute behavioral metrics and analyze their relationship with the learning gains and enjoyment of students based on survey responses. The author reports on the exploratory results of the different metrics and correlation analysis to analyze the interplay between these three sets of metrics. This work will exemplify the potential that learning analytics approaches and serious games have to transform education and training across contexts.