Sorting Test, Tower Test, and BRIEF-SR do not predict school performance of healthy adolescents in preuniversity education

Executive functions (EF) such as self-monitoring, planning, and organizing are known to develop through childhood and adolescence. They are of potential importance for learning and school performance. Earlier research into the relation between EF and school performance did not provide clear results possibly because confounding factors such as educational track, boy-girl differences, and parental education were not taken into account. The present study therefore investigated the relation between executive function tests and school performance in a highly controlled sample of 173 healthy adolescents aged 12–18. Only students in the pre-university educational track were used and the performance of boys was compared to that of girls. Results showed that there was no relation between the report marks obtained and the performance on executive function tests, notably the Sorting Test and the Tower Test of the Delis-Kaplan Executive Functions System (D-KEFS). Likewise, no relation was found between the report marks and the scores on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function—Self-Report Version (BRIEF-SR) after these were controlled for grade, sex, and level of parental education. The findings indicate that executive functioning as measured with widely used instruments such as the BRIEF-SR does not predict school performance of adolescents in preuniversity education any better than a student's grade, sex, and level of parental education.

Evaluation of Serious Games: A Holistic Approach

Digital games constitute a major emerging technology that is expected to enter mainstream educational use within a few years. The highly engaging and motivating character of such games bears great potential to support immersive, meaningful, and situated learning experiences. To seize this potential, meaningful quality and impact measurements are indispensible. Although there is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of games for learning, evaluation is often poorly designed, incomplete, biased, if not entirely absent. Well-designed evaluations demonstrating the educational effect as well as the return on investment of serious games may foster broader adoption by educational institutions and training providers, and support the development of the serious game industry. The European project RAGE introduces a comprehensive and multi-perspective framework for serious game evaluation, which is presented in this paper.

Amplifying applied game development and uptake

The established (digital) leisure game industry is historically one dominated by large international hardware vendors (e.g. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), major publishers and supported by a complex network of development studios, distributors and retailers. New modes of digital distribution and development practice are challenging this business model and the leisure games industry landscape is one experiencing rapid change. The established (digital) leisure games industry, at least anecdotally, appears reluctant to participate actively in the applied games sector (Stewart et al., 2013). There are a number of potential explanations as to why this may indeed be the case including ; A concentration on large-scale consolidation of their (proprietary) platforms, content, entertainment brand and credibility which arguably could be weakened by association with the conflicting notion of purposefulness (in applied games) in market niches without clear business models or quantifiable returns on investment. In contrast, the applied games industry exhibits the characteristics of an emerging, immature industry namely: weak interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, an absence of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited division of labour and arguably insufficient evidence of the products efficacies (Stewart et al., 2013; Garcia Sanchez, 2013) and could, arguably, be characterised as a dysfunctional market. To test these assertions the Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) project will develop a number of self contained gaming assets to be actively employed in the creation of a number of applied games to be implemented and evaluated as regional pilots across a variety of European educational, training and vocational contexts. RAGE is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project with twenty (pan European) partners from industry, research and education with the aim of developing, transforming and enriching advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets (i.e. solutions showing economic value potential) that could support a variety of stakeholders including teachers, students, and, significantly, game studios interested in developing applied games. RAGE will provide these assets together with a large quantity of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, a social space that connects research, the gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users in order to stimulate the development and application of applied games in educational, training and vocational contexts. The authors identify barriers (real and perceived) and opportunities facing stakeholders in engaging, exploring new emergent business models ,developing, establishing and sustaining an applied gaming eco system in Europe.