Effect of educational games on reading comprehension and attitude towards Turkish lessons of second grade primary school students

The aim of this study is to determine the effect of educational games on second-grade primary school students' reading comprehension and their attitude towards the Turkish course. The study employed a quantitative research method, specifically a quasi-experimental design. Among the experimental designs, a pretest-posttest control group model was used. This research was conducted with the participation of 80 second-grade students studying at Abdurrahman Nermin Bilimli Primary School in the Bağcılar district of Istanbul. The study lasted for 12 weeks. In the experimental group, the lessons were enriched with educational game activities developed in line with the second-grade Turkish course reading comprehension objectives. In the control group, lessons were conducted according to the regular curriculum based on the Turkish course textbook. At the beginning and end of the study, both the experimental and control groups were administered a reading comprehension test and an attitude scale towards the Turkish course. The data obtained were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0 software. As a result of the analyses, when the posttest reading comprehension scores of the experimental and control groups were compared, a significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group (t(78)=9.11, p<0.001). The posttest mean score for reading comprehension in the experimental group was X̅=91.68, while it was X̅=63.75 in the control group. This result indicates that the implemented educational games were effective in improving reading comprehension. Additionally, when the posttest scores of the attitude scale towards the Turkish course were compared between the experimental and control groups, a significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group (t(78)=5.99, p<0.001). The posttest mean score of the experimental group was X̅=55.93, while the control group's mean was X̅=48.40. This result suggests that the educational games were effective in improving students' attitudes towards the Turkish course. Based on the results of the study, it is recommended that educational games be used in primary school Turkish lessons.