Effects of a Digital Game-Based Course in Building Adolescents' Knowledge and Social-Emotional Competencies.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of a digital game-based course to build domain knowledge and social emotional competencies of empathy and compassion in adolescents. Materials and Methods: The study used a digital game Bury me, my Love with an accompanying course which was administered to 201 participants between ages 13-18 across United Arab Emirates (UAE) and India. Standardized self-reports were used to score participants on measures of knowledge and attitudes, empathy, and compassion before and after the intervention. Mixed analyses of variance were conducted with 1 between-subjects factor (gender) and 1 within-subjects factor (time) to determine the impact of the intervention, followed by post hoc t-tests. Results: Increased effects of intervention were obtained for both knowledge and social emotional learning in both UAE and India. Specifically, there was a significant increase in awareness of migration and refugees in both India (P < 0.001) and UAE (P < 0.001). Interesting effects of gender were seen in which females in both countries showed increases in compassion from others (P < 0.05). Conclusion: This study opens a new window in game-based learning. The design of a structured course with learning outcomes that are centered around a digital game establishes its potential to create engaging and accessible solutions to simultaneously build domain knowledge and social-emotional competencies in adolescents.

The case of the neglected alphasyllabary: orthographic processing in Devanagari.

We applaud Ram Frost for highlighting the need for multicultural perspectives while developing universal models of visual word recognition. We second Frost's proposal that factors like lexical morphology should be incorporated besides purely orthographic features in modeling word recognition. In support, we provide fresh evidence from Hindi (written in Devanagari), an example of hitherto under-represented alphasyllabic orthographies, in which flexible encoding of aksara (character) position is constrained by the morphological structure of words.