Date of Award
Fall 10-28-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Education in Secondary & Middle Grades Education
Department
English Education
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Robert Montgomery
Second Advisor
Mei-Lin Chang
Third Advisor
Jen Dail
Fourth Advisor
Steve Goss
Abstract
This quasi-experimental study explores the effectiveness of using a video game as a text in high school narrative instruction, testing Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated learning theory, which posits that learning is a by-product of social interaction. This study seeks to bridge the gap between literacy practices at home and in school (Beavis, 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1995), effectively acknowledging students’ cultural capital, including multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and affinity spaces (Gee, 2013) in privileged academic settings such as the Georgia Milestones American Literature End of Course assessment. 11th grade American literature students in a suburban Georgia high school were split into two groups: one group received a more traditional narrative unit (comparison) with John Steinbeck’s (1937) Of Mice and Men and the other (experimental) received a narrative unit using Giant Sparrow’s (2017) narratively driven video game, What Remains of Edith Finch, and both groups took a survey to explore their relationship with video game literacies. Results from the independent and paired samples t-tests, Spearman’s Rho, and multiple linear regression models indicated that studying a video game as a text to drive narrative instruction is comparable to teaching students with a print-based text. These findings support teachers’ efforts to include more digital, multimodal texts into their classrooms without compromising state test scores.
