International Portal of Teacher Education

Source: Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 56:3, 318-329

(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

By identifying factors that act as barriers for teachers to adopt educational video games, managers of Higher Education institutions can develop Teacher Training Programmes (TTP)to help teachers adopt educational video games in their courses.
Because educational video games are a technological innovation, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1985) was used by the researchers as a conceptual framework in this study.

The TAM
The TAM (Davis, 1985) was developed to predict an individual’s likelihood to accept a technological innovation. TAM has been widely applied to different technological innovations in educational contexts including cloud services to support collaborative learning, online education and mobile learning. One of the main goals of TAM was to identify the major motivational variables that mediate between system characteristics and the actual use of the system.
Davis (1985) identified two major variables influencing attitude towards a given technological innovation:
(a) perceived usefulness and
(b) perceived ease of use.
Design features directly influence both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use.
Finally, attitude influences the actual system use (adoption).
The following hypotheses were posited by the authors in this study:

H1: teachers’ perceived usefulness of educational video games has a positive influence on attitude towards educational video games.

H2: teachers’ perceived usefulness of educational video games has a positive influence on teachers’ behavioural intention to use educational video games.

H3: teachers’ perceived ease of use of educational video games has a positive influence on
attitude towards educational video games.

H4: teachers’ perceived ease of use of educational video games has a positive influence on
teachers’ perceived usefulness of educational video games.

H5: teachers’ positive attitude towards educational video games has a positive influence on
teachers’ behavioural intention to use educational video games.

H6: gender will moderate the effect of teachers’ attitude towards educational video games on
teachers’ behavioural intention to use educational video games.

H7: age will moderate the effect of teachers’ attitude towards educational video games on
teachers’ behavioural intention to use educational video games.

Method
Data was gathered by the researchers through an online questionnaire.
A total of 312 teachers serving in higher education institutions completed the online questionnaire.
The age of the participants ranges between 26 and 65 years, with an average of 42.8 years and 52.4% are male
Survey instrument - All items used to develop the questionnaire were adapted from existing scales: ten items were adapted from Davis (1985) to measure perceived usefulness; ten items were adapted from Davis (1985) to measure perceived ease of use; three items were adapted from Taylor and Todd (1995) to measure attitude; and three items were adapted from Shimp and Kavas (1984) to measure behavioural intention.
All questionnaire items were measured using a five-point Likert-type scale where (1) = strongly disagree, and (5) = strongly agree.

Results and discussion
The authors report that their results suggest that perceived usefulness is a main antecedent of Higher Education teachers’ attitude towards educational video games, that is, the higher the teachers’ perceptions of educational video games to be useful for their teaching the better the attitude towards educational video games.
Perceived usefulness also predicts Higher Education teachers’ behavioural intention to use educational video games.
Although a direct effect of ease of use on attitude was not found by the researchers, ease of use indirectly influences attitude through perceived usefulness.
This has an explanation following this rationale: teachers will not have a positive attitude towards educational video games just because they perceive educational video games are easy to use, but teachers must perceive that the use of educational video games is useful to enhance their teaching activity for having a positive attitude.
The authors note that attitude towards educational video games directly and positively influences teachers’ intention to use educational video games.
Gender and age were not found by the authors to moderate teachers’ attitude and behavioural intention suggesting that teachers show different beliefs and behavioural intentions when thinking about video games as a teaching resource and not as a leisure time activity (Kenny & McDaniel, 2011).
 

Conclusions
The authors conclude that Teacher Training Programs (TTP) should show teachers how useful educational video games could be in their teaching activity in order to increase teachers’ positive attitude towards educational video games and, therefore, to increase teachers’ adoption of educational video games in their courses.

Because teachers’ perceived ease of use does not directly affect teachers’ attitude towards educational video games the authors suggest that TTP should not focus in the easiness of using educational video games as a teaching methodology. 

They note that although TTP can provide teachers with resources to use educational video games in an easier way, these resources will not be a driver for teachers’ unless they perceive that using the resources will be useful and not just easy.
The authors strees that one surprising finding of this research is that neither gender nor age moderate teachers’ attitude nor intention to use educational video games.
They note that this finding challenges traditional gaming behaviour literature analysing video games as a leisure time activity, suggesting that the role of gender and age in an educational context must be reframed.
 

References
Davis, F. D. (1985). A technology acceptance model for empirically testing new end-user information systems: Theory and results. (Doctoral thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/15192
Kenny, R. F., & McDaniel, R. (2011). The role teachers’ expectations and value assessments of video games play in their adopting and integrating them into their classrooms. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42, 197–213. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01007.x
Shimp, T. A., & Kavas, A. (1984). The theory of reasoned action applied to coupon usage. Journal of Consumer Research, 11, 795–809. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489069
Taylor, S., & Todd, P. (1995). Understanding information technology usage: A test of competing models. Information Systems Research, 6, 144–176. doi:10.1287/isre.6.2.144