Validity of a Simulation Game as a Method for History Teaching

The aim of this research is, first, to determine the validity of a simulation game as a method of teaching and an instrument for the development of reasoning and, second, to study the relationship between learning and students ’ behavior toward games. The participants were college students in a History of International Relations course, with two groups participating in a simulation game and one serving as a control group. The results show that the experimental groups had higher scores on a test of comprehension and that participants within these two groups who were identified as operating at a level of formal reasoning (as evaluated by an arrangement test) obtained the highest knowledge scores. Learning style was found to be an important variable in explaining motivation toward the game. Keywords behavior, efficiency of games, experiments on games, history, learning style, reasoning, validity Research on the development of formal operations—particularly in Québec, Canada (Torkia-Lagacé, 1980)—has shown that teaching methods rely on inadequate assump-tions about theoretical learning. For many students, conceptual development drags through the secondary and college levels (students aged 12 to 19 years). The research conducted by Torkia-Lagacé (1980) shows that when compared to students of health and physical sciences, a smaller proportion of humanities and social sciences students have reached a high level of formal operations. This state of affairs may be explained in several different ways: First, teaching is inadequate; second, for-mal operations develop later in the field of humanities and social sciences (horizontal decalage); third, the research carried out so far has been inadequate or biased