Pedagogy Students’ Attitudes towards Collaborative Learning with Video Games : Considering Demographic Information and the Variety of Digital Resources

Resumen

In modern society, people are surrounded by technology, which they use to communicate, inform, study, work and entertain. However, digital technologies can also be used to implement innovative educational practices. Video games are being increasingly incorporated into different educational levels and educational settings. However, the use of video games in educational settings is heavily dependent on educators’ attitudes towards them. Therefore, in this chapter, we want to search for and research about the attitudes from a specific type of educators to discover their predisposition towards video games. In this regard, we analyse the attitudes of higher education students in the undergraduate Degree in Pedagogy at the University of Salamanca (Spain) towards one of the approaches to implementing video games in education: collaborative learning with video games. As the future graduates of this course will be working in various educational contexts, it is important to know their current attitudes towards the use of video games in education and, specifically, towards collaborative learning with video games. This study is an ex post facto study that uses a specially created attitude scale. The questionnaire contains questions about the students’ demographics, the variety of digital resources they use and their frequency of playing video games. The results show that higher education students in pedagogy have positive attitudes towards collaborative learning with video games, suggesting that they are likely to implement innovative practices using video games in collaborative learning activities in the future. Furthermore, male students and students who play video games more frequently have better attitudes towards using video games in collaborative learning activities. In addition, those with smartphones at home have more positive attitudes than those without. Finally, students’ ages and the variety of digital resources they use to play video games at home impact their attitudes towards collaborative learning with video games.