According to national and international assessment results, there is a serious problem regarding reading comprehension skills in Mexico, specifically global reading comprehension. Different tools and techniques have been used to try to minimize this problem. Serious games with educational purposes are a popular tool, as they are useful in developing abilities or improving learning on top of being fun to play. This chapter presents the use of a prototype of a serious game to improve global reading comprehension in children attending the third grade of primary school. The instruction design was empathizing in the design section. Through a quasi-experiment during a four-month period, the game was tested in five third-grade students. Results show a significant improvement in their global reading comprehension skill. However, as future work, and after the quarantine, a bigger sample size is required to generalize findings.
TopIntroduction
The written word is ubiquitous, which makes reading skills a fundamental competency that is necessary for any area of an individual’s life. Reading is a complex cognitive activity. Compared to listening or speaking, reading is not an inherently natural process. Learning to read requires considerable cognitive effort and a long learning process (Grabe, 2006).
Serrano (2005) maintains that the acquisition of oral language is a natural act, due to the child’s exposure to the speaking environment of the adult; the written language, conversely, is a cultural skill that demands a systematic process of teaching-learning to be mastered. This skill encompasses a variety of cognitive, psycho-linguistic, and affective processes. Among the cognitive ones, we can find: perception, attention, learning, and memory; within the psycholinguistic category, there are letter and word identification, and ordering them in paragraphs, the integration of the meaning they have within the context of reading, and comprehension; and in the processes of an affective nature: motivation, interest in reading, the taste for reading, exposure to reading, the kind of lesson that is being received, access to reading materials, among others (Grabe, 2008; Serrano, 2005). Therefore, for every person, reading is an essential tool for learning.
From an early age, human beings are exposed to various stimuli that reinforce reading as a necessity to access diverse technologies and fields of knowledge (Strickland, 2002). Thorne et al. (2013) mention that, the higher the level of reading comprehension, the higher level of the structural development of nations.
Perrusquia et al. (2010) explain that reading is a process that each person does by themselves, which allows for an examination of the test to analyze each one of its parts and notice the essential by comparing existing with recently acquired knowledge. According to Thorne et al. (2013) reading is recognized as a constructive act that implicates a set of complex cognitive and psycholinguistic, like decodification and comprehension.
Grabe (2008) sustains that each person reads with a different purpose, and based on this, each one of them uses different cognitive processes and information resources. Among the different purposes of reading, there are: quick reading to identify relevant information in the text (scanning, skimming), reading for an overall comprehension, reading to learn, reading to integrate, and reading to evaluate critically.
Reading to comprehend requires a series of visual and semantic processes, along with the construction of an abridged version of the meaning of the text. To understand what is being read, refers to creating or finding meaning starting from the text. This meaning creation depends to a great extent in having the skill of automatic recognition of words, an appropriate knowledge of background or context and a series of comprehension strategies to use them as needed (Grabe, 2006, 2008).
The varied abilities inherent to reading are essential for the personal and social development of any person participating in an informed and active manner in society, as well as to exercise fully all the rights granted to a citizen. Moreover, these abilities are essential to take part in and advance in the job market. People with incorrect reading abilities have their opportunities hampered in the current society (De Coster et al., 2011). Peredo Merlo (1997) explains that the level of a person’s reading is related to their work performance. All of this confirms the importance of reading, not only in academia but also in a professional and personal setting.
Despite the above, the results for Mexico in international as well as national evaluations, constantly report a profound reading deficit. Some Mexican students are incapable of finding implicit information since they hardly reach comprehension of overt information, and when found, they are incapable of interpreting and evaluating it to take a critical stand regarding such information (Peredo Merlo, 2011).
On the other hand, one of the significant points in the education sector is the change in the attitude of the students and their motivation towards learning. Prensky (2005) categorizes students in 3 groups: (1) the self-motivated (2) the ones that do it because they feel an obligation to do it and, (3) the ones that ignore professors. Additionally, they highlight that the third group believes that education is irrelevant and a waste of time; it also mentions that the latter group is growing, becoming the majority. Other known problems include the increase in diversity among students, the learning style of each one, the increasing amount of what they must learn and also, the limited resources in education and formation (Tang et al., 2009).