The Effect of Educational Computer Games on the Metacognitive Skills of Students in Biology

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of educational computer games on the metacognitive skills of the 10th grade students in Biology. Regarding this goal, research hypotheses about the effect of educational computer games on some metacognitive components including learning motivation, self-regulation learning and student's meta-memory were studied. The statistical population of the study was all male students of the 10th grade in the field of empirical sciences in school year 2016-17, in secondary schools in Qom, District 1. Students of one of the state-run high schools were selected as sample by available sampling method. The present study is applied in terms of its purpose and quasi-experimental in terms of its method. The pretest-posttest method was performed with two groups of control and experiment. For all three hypotheses in this study, covariance test with Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Levene test were used for pretest and control group. The results showed that educational computer games, besides that had a positive effect on learning motivation and self-regulation learning as the meta-cognitive components of students, they also strengthen their meta-memory.