The Impact of Game Playing on Students’ Reasoning Ability, Varying According to Their Cognitive Style

Abstract

Students with different cognitive styles benefit from different instructional strategies, including learning through playing video games. Although playing video games can be an effective learning method, we do not know its impact on the reasoning ability of students with different cognitive styles. The purposes of this study are to investigate whether students with different cognitive styles improve their reasoning ability after playing video games and whether the effect is the same for all students. We used a pretest-posttest experimental design with multivariant analyses and found that elementary school students’ reasoning ability improved reliably after playing a puzzle adventure game for four weeks, twice a week. In addition, field-independent students’ reasoning ability improved reliably more than field-dependent students did. Students with different cognitive styles also demonstrated noticeably different information search strategies during game playing. Our work answers the questions regarding the impact of playing video games in students’ reasoning ability and in students with different cognitive styles. We also suggested guidelines of designing educational video games for field-dependent and field-independent students. Future studies are needed to expand our understanding to the relationships between other types of video game, cognitive ability, and cognitive styles.