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Publication Detailed Description
Journal Title
BMC Psychology
Year (definitive publication)
2025
Language
English
Country
United Kingdom
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Abstract
It is vital that working memory capacity can be assessed and trained with motivating resources, in a personalized way in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. This paper illustrates the possibility of a serious game, such as WorM, to assess and train children’s working memory capacity. WorM was designed, developed and evaluated through three studies (Study 1: informative, Study 2: validation and Study 3: user studies). The first two qualitative studies employ in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, to identify, argue and validate suitable design aspects guided by interviews from teachers and psychologists. The third study presents the usefulness of WorM based on the Item Response Theory analysis and answers from 23 end-user, typical children. Examples of important design aspects identified in Study 1 revealed the role of captivating interests, customization, short duration, rewards, feedback and clear instructions for designing tasks with right images and sound effects. From these, Study 2 enhanced the role of interactive visual feedback for correct and incorrect sorting, using images, keyboard keys, multiple colors, or the phase of the trial. Study 3 illustrates how Correct Pepper Classification tasks show some variability in difficulty, where the range of difficulties was higher in the game tasks than in the standardized Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI) task, usually applied for identifying the NDD characteristics in the examined users. While both instruments showed good reliability with high Person and Item Separation Reliability and Cronbach’s alpha values, the findings of this paper suggest that serious games can offer promising prospects to provide meaningful contexts to assess and train working memory by the WorM game.
Acknowledgements
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Keywords
Working memory,Educational platform,Neurodevelopmental disorders,Serious games
Fields of Science and Technology Classification
- Computer and Information Sciences - Natural Sciences
- Health Sciences - Medical and Health Sciences
- Psychology - Social Sciences
- Educational Sciences - Social Sciences
Funding Records
| Funding Reference | Funding Entity |
|---|---|
| 101060918 | Comissão Europeia |
Related Projects
This publication is an output of the following project(s):
Contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations
With the objective to increase the research activity directed towards the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the possibility of associating scientific publications with the Sustainable Development Goals is now available in Ciência_Iscte. These are the Sustainable Development Goals identified by the author(s) for this publication. For more detailed information on the Sustainable Development Goals, click here.
