Implementing game-based and quest technologies in secondary school geography: a quasi-experimental study of 7th-grade learning outcomes in Kazakhstan

The modernization of school education in Central Asia has placed innovative learning technologies at the center of national education policy, yet evidence on how such technologies perform in ordinary classrooms remains scarce. This study examined whether the systematic use of game-based and quest technologies in Grade 7 geography lessons is associated with higher student achievement than conventional instruction. A quasi-experiment with a repeated cross-sectional design was conducted over three academic years (2017–2020) in two state secondary schools in the Zhambyl region of Kazakhstan: a new Grade 7 cohort was assessed in each school at a baseline stage and at two formative stages. The experimental group ( n = 45 per stage, School No. 28 named after A. Moldagulova, Taraz) studied geography through a program of didactic games, educational quests, and interactive tasks embedded in short-term lesson plans, while the control group ( n = 55 per stage, A. Makarenko Secondary School, Zhambyl district) followed the standard curriculum. Achievement was taken from criterion-based assessment and classified into low, medium, and high levels. At baseline the achievement distributions of the two groups were similar [χ 2 (2) = 0.42, p = 0.809]. Across stages, the share of high-achieving students in the experimental group rose from 20.0% to 35.5% (two-sided p = 0.099) and changed little in the control group (from 23.6% to 25.4%); the difference-in-differences was +13.7 percentage points (95% CI −10.6 to 38.0, p = 0.268). Neither the between-group contrast at the final stage [χ 2 (2) = 1.67, p = 0.434] nor the group × stage interaction in an ordinal regression (OR = 1.30, 95% CI 0.76–2.21, p = 0.333) was statistically significant. At the final stage, students in the experimental group showed higher technological competence in all three domains ( p = 0.002–0.039), although group-level results exist only for the final stage and the questionnaire is not validated. The achievement results are therefore descriptively favorable but statistically inconclusive, and because the groups coincide with schools, causal attribution is limited. The study documents an implementable low-technology model, proposes exploratory pedagogical conditions for its use, and specifies the design needed for a confirmatory evaluation.