Uncovering Gender and Problem Difficulty Effects in Learning with an Educational Game

A prior study showed that middle school students who used the educational game Decimal Point achieved significantly higher gain scores on immediate and delayed posttests of decimal understanding than students who learned with a more conventional computer-based learning tool. This paper reports on new analyses of the data from that study, providing new insights into the benefits of the game. First, females benefited more than males from the game. Second, students in the game condition performed better on the more difficult intervention problems. This paper presents these new analyses and discusses why the educational game might have led to these results.