By IANS
New York : Video games use extremely effective teaching techniques – which is probably why violent video games make players aggressive, says a new study.
The study by two US researchers has found that students who played multiple violent video games over a six-month period quickly learned new and ever more hostile actions.
The findings of the study have been published in the online edition of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
The researchers — Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University and his father J. Ronald Gentile of State University of New York – found that violent video games motivate players to persevere and master the skills needed to handle complex problems and changing environments, just as good teachers do.
“We know a lot about how to be an effective teacher, and we know a lot about how to use technology to teach,” said lead author Douglas Gentile.
“Video games use many of these techniques and are highly effective teachers. So we shouldn’t be surprised that violent video games can teach aggression.”
The study, which involved 2,500 students, outlined seven parallels between video games and “best practices” used by effective teachers, including the ability to adapt to the level of each individual learner and teaching for transfer to real-world situations.
“Because we had longitudinal data, we were able to show that students who play multiple violent games actually changed to have a greater hostile attribution bias, which also increased their aggressive behaviors over prior levels,” the researchers wrote.
The study is, however, not all bad news for video games.
As these were found to be such effective teaching tools, the researchers propose greater educational use of the video games technology that “thinks” along with students, adapting instruction to each student’s current skills, strategies or mistakes.