The Effect of Board Games on the Academic Achievement and Learning Motivation of Fourth-Grade Elementary Student

Abstract

: Nowadays, due to the advancement of technology, students can no longer produce new cognitive structures and take an active part in their learning process with traditional teaching methods such as lectures. Therefore, teachers should use teaching methods that attract students to learning. Therefore, one of the effective teaching methods for this demand is teaching with the help of various games. For this purpose, the present study investigated the effect of board games on the academic achievement and learning motivation of fourth-grade elementary students. This research is quantitative. The results of this study were collected from experiments on control and experimental groups. The statistical population, at first, all male students in the sixth grade of primary school in the city of Karaj were considered for the academic year 2022-2023. Then, by cluster sampling, it was reduced to one school and finally, randomly, to two classes of 30 people. The control group was trained by the usual method of the teacher`s explaining and then answering the questions in the book. The training of the experimental group was done by a board game. In the end, students of both groups were given a questionnaire to evaluate their teaching method and learning rate. Then, the same test was taken from both groups, and the average scores of both groups were calculated. The mean for the control group was equal to 12.23 and for the experimental group, equal to 16.53. According to the results of the surveys of the questionnaires and also the results of the tests of the two groups, the result showed that educational games, specifically board games, increase the learning rate of students and increase their interest in learning.