Serious Games in Vocational White-Collar Lessons – A Methodological End in Itself or a Competency-Promoting Learning Method?

It is indisputable that games are suitable for lessons, and in this context “serious games” have a special role. The goal of the current study is to establish whether serious games are efficient in the area of vocational white collar education, whereby the following research question is asked: To what degree do serious games lead to superior learning results in comparison to traditional group work? In order to answer this question, four groups were formed, two of which took part in a serious game on the topic of “stock market” and two took part in a group work approach to the same topic. Within these different formations, the respective approach was applied at two different DQR (German Qualifications Framework) levels. Subsequently, the learning results were measured by using a uniform learning test. By means of a twofactor variance analysis, both the impact of the method as well as the DQR level were measured. Although no generally increased effectiveness of serious games as a methodology could be found over the methodology of “group work”, the analysis does show a significantly positive change in the learning effectiveness of serious games among the DQR levels, so that we can assume that serious games show increased effectiveness over group work at lower DQR levels. In line with this finding, we can speak of a “meaningful supplement” with regard to the use of serious games. However, this does not signify that this method is generally better than that of group work: a precise analysis of classes is needed in order to ascertain whether method competence has been trained sufficiently in order to make effective use of serious games.