Video games and higher education students from the Degree in Pedagogyattitude towards collaborative learning with video games and other related variables

Resumen

Nowadays, people live their lives surrounded by technology. We use technology to communicate, check news, study and for entertainment. However, digital technologies can also be used to develop innovative practices in education and to address the syllabus in different ways. As the most common form of digital entertainment, video games are being more frequently incorporated into different educational levels (e.g. primary or secondary education). However, the use of video games in education is heavily dependent educators’ attitudes towards them. Therefore, in this paper, we examine the attitudes of higher education students on the degree course in Pedagogy at the University of Salamanca towards collaborative learning with video games. As the future graduates of this course will be pedagogues, educationalist, teachers or educators in various educational contexts, it is important to establish their current attitudes towards the use of video games in education. We use an attitude scale created ad hoc for the study comprising 33 Likert items to know about their attitudes. Also, the questionnaire has other questions to ask the students about their gender, their frequency of playing video games and their playing preferences. Overall, the results show a positive attitude (mean=3.88; standard deviation=0.40) of the future pedagogues-educationalists towards collaborative learning with video games (which is nearly the option “Agree” in the scale), suggesting that they will likely implement innovative practices using video games in collaborative learning activities in the future. Furthermore, the male students, those who typically play video games more frequently and those who prefer to play video games with other people have better attitudes towards using video games in collaborative learning.