An Empirical Investigation Into the Impact of First-Person Role-Playing Games to Improve Knowledge Retention in Middle-School Children in India: A Pre-Post Study of the Game 'Tattva Bhoomi'

A pre-post study by Solanki and Mathew at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad examines whether Tattva Bhoomi, an exploration-based first-person role-playing game teaching classification of elements and periodicity from a Class 11 chemistry chapter, improves short-term knowledge retention among Indian middle-school students. The work is motivated by the observation that game-based learning research has been concentrated in Western contexts, and that Indian classrooms face distinct challenges such as linguistic diversity, limited home support, and a reliance on rote learning, which the authors argue call for more participatory instructional approaches.

The study comprised three controlled experiments involving 142 students across two schools, St. Mary's Higher Secondary School and Colonel's Academy, spanning Classes 8, 10, and 11. Each experiment followed the same design: random assignment to control and experimental groups, a 14-item pretest drawn from the chemistry chapter, a game-based intervention for the experimental group only, and an identical posttest. Results were analyzed with the Mann-Whitney U test. In all three experiments the experimental groups showed substantially larger gains than controls, with average improvements of roughly 30 to 46 percent for experimental groups against changes of about 2 to 3 percent for controls, and differences reported as significant at p < .01.

The authors note that the single 60-minute session produced the strongest gains among the intervention formats tested, though the comparison across schools, grades, and session lengths is confounded by differences in sample composition and is not a controlled comparison of duration. The study is limited by its English-language medium, its short-term retention focus, and the fact that the developer also served as researcher, a potential source of bias that the authors acknowledge, though an independent observer was present throughout. The authors suggest that similar games could in principle teach other subjects, but that remains untested.