Impact of digital escape room games on English prep students' academic success, motivation, and communication

This study aims to investigate the impact of educational digital escape room games on the academic performance, motivation, and communicative openness of students at a preparatory school during a fully online module. The study's participants were 30 prep school students who were enrolled in a private university in Istanbul during the spring semester of the 2022–2023 academic year. While the control group studied the topic using textbooks and online worksheets in a similar manner, the experimental group played 5 different instructional digital escape room games for 40 minutes each over the course of 5 weeks in the study, which was performed fully online. In order to collect data from the participants, a language achievement test, a motivation survey, a self-efficacy survey, and a willingness to communicate survey were used in the study. For the quantitative data, 2X2 mixed ANOVA was used. For the follow-up, Benferroni corrected between subject and paired samples t-test were employed by using SPSS 26.0 statistical package program. When the quantitative data were analyzed, there was no significant difference in the students' academic performance, motivation, self-efficacy, and willingness to communicate between the experimental group and the control group. Keywords: Educational Digital Escape Room Games, Game-Based Learning, Escape Room, Distance Learning