Abstract
Metacognitive Strategies in Serious Games: A Literature Survey
The practice of teaching and learning with games presents many obstacles in the
educational scenarios while the potential of games to take education one step further
in limited time cannot be ignored. Today’s educational games fail to offer sufficient
opportunities for reflection, as well as usage of skills, and they are assessed with lower
levels of learning. That is why, need for games-based research is observed for teaching
metacognitive skills or using metacognitive skills to teach with serious games. Due to
the scarcity of computer-based research studies involving metacognitive support and the
fact that these studies exist as case studies rather than generalizations, it is decided that
a thorough examination in this field is necessary. The aim of this study is to understand
how metacognitive strategies are used for learning in serious games and how they are
accommodated by game mechanics. As a model of research, for this purpose, a literature
survey, which is more focused on contemporary topics than literature review and which
serves a predefined purpose is used. With this model, the usage of metacognitive strategies
in serious games, the conceptual origin of this usage affecting both learning and design of
game mechanics are examined and evaluated. The categorization of research according
to the metacognitive strategy used are modeling, prompting, reflection and monitoring.
Most used metacognitive strategies in these studies are found to be error correction,
confidence building, reflection, problematization. According to these findings, suggestions
on how to accommodate metacognitive strategies in games using game mechanics and
directions for further studies are developed.
Keywords
Metacognitive Strategies, Serious Games, Game Mechanics, Reflection, Monitoring, Modeling.
