The impact of educational digital games on student academic achievement in social studies course

This research aims to investigate the influence of educational digital games on the academic achievement of sixth-grade students in social studies. A quantitative research study employed a pretest and post-test control group quasi-experimental design. The study group comprised two 6th-grade courses from a public middle school in the city of Gaziantep in Türkiye during the initial semester of the 2024-2025 academic year. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to determine whether the post-test achievement scores of the experimental and control groups differed significantly. A notable disparity was observed favoring the experimental group, with the experimental group obtaining a higher mean post-test score (X̅ = 14.77) than the control group (X̅ = 12.67) (t58= 2.589, p < .05). The effect size of the notable difference was computed as d = .67. The findings indicate that the use of educational digital games significantly improved sixth-grade students’ academic achievement in social studies.