Study: Workers Absorb Training Easier When Using Video Games

The University of Colorado Business School has put together a new study which suggests that those workers who train using video games can absorb and then remember their training better than those that are exposed to more passive learning methods.

The study is set to be published in the scientific journal Personnel Psychology and says that those who were trained using video games were 11 percent better at grasping the facts they were taught, displayed a 14% better knowledge of job skills and retained information at a rate that was 9% better than for those in the control group.

Traci Sitzmann, who is an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado and worked on the new study, says, “Remember the video game is a tool and not a substitute for training. But if you can engage your employee with the video game, you will likely get a well-trained worker.”

She also says that the effectiveness of video based aided training is affected by the actual titles which are chosen for the process and the study warns that training games are better when instructions are offered before and after game time and when employees are intrinsically motivated.

The study has used another 65 previous published papers for data, together covering the training for more than 6,500 people.

This comes after other studies have confirmed that those who are playing video games have better reaction times than those who do not and are better able to evaluate and respond to problems in the real world.

The possibilities for video game aided teaching will be enhanced after motion tracking systems like Kinect and PlayStation Move are more widely adopted.

Kinect especially is an interesting device because it is easy to use without previous instruction and the fact that it lacks a physical controller means that it can probably be adapted for a variety of tasks.