Investigation of the effects of educational games on first grade students' reading skills in teaching first reading and writing

The game is both an entertainment tool for children and a teaching method that is frequently used by teachers and families for their physical, emotional and cognitive development. The use of the game in the primary school years starting from the preschool period affects the students' attitudes towards the school positively and as a result, the academic success of the students is high. Children who have successfully overcome the first literacy education continue their success in the following school years. The research is a quantitative study to examine the effect of educational game use on first grade students' reading skills in teaching first reading and writing. In the research, the experimental design, which is one of the quantitative research methods, and the pretest-posttest paired control group quasi-experimental design among the experimental design models were used. The study group of the research consists of two first classes of a primary school in Gebze district of Kocaeli province in the academic year of 2018-2019. The research was carried out with a total of 58 students, 29 of whom were in the experimental group and 29 people in the control group. In order to collect the data, a reading skills observation form consisting of 10 items was created by taking expert opinion by the researcher. With the observation form created, the pre-tests of the students were taken at the beginning of the semester, and then the educational games prepared for the experimental group were decided with the teacher and applied for 3 hours a week. In which lessons the educational games will be applied, taking into account the opinion of the classroom teacher, Turkish, Free Activity and Physical Education and Game lessons were carried out. Before the research, experimental and control group teachers were interviewed and information was given about the process. The pre-research games were introduced to the experimental group teacher and the necessary explanations were made about the functioning of the process. Nonparametric tests were used to analyze the data. Among the nonparametric tests, the Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to determine whether there was a difference between the pre-test and post-test of the experimental group, and the Many Whitney U test was used to determine the difference between the pre-tests and post-tests of the experimental and control groups. As a result of the research, it was understood that the difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control group students' reading skills was significant. When the difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group students who gained reading skills with educational games was examined, it was seen that the difference scores were in favor of the post-test (z = 4,726, p <0,05). This result shows that the achievement scores of the experimental group students who gain reading skills with educational games have increased.