Paper Title
The Effects of Serious Board Games on College Students’ Use of Cognitive Strategies

Abstract
To aid cognitive processing and structuring, learners must be engaged in activities that provoke students’ mental process (e.g., rehearsal, organization, elaboration). Learners need to be self-motivated and persistent in deliberately practice executing thecognitive strategies during their learning process. A well-designed serious game may motivate learners to persistently execute specific strategies to accomplish the game tasks. Therefore, this study aims to design three serious board games providing joyful environment for learner to practice using cognitive strategies. Three serious board games were designed and developed by the research team. The pre-and-posttest experimental research method was adopted to investigate the quality and effects of the games on the players’ mastery of the chosen domain knowledge. Thirty-six college students, matriculated in educational technology program, participated in the summative evaluation for three consecutive weeks. The results show that the participants are satisfied with the games with the average scores above 4.3. In regard with the participants’ mastery of chosen domain knowledge, the paired t-test result supports the significant difference between post-test and pre-test (t=11.55, p<0.001). To address the limitation of single-group experimental design, a partial correlation using the pre-test score as the control variable was conducted. A significant correlation between game performance and the post-test scores (r=.39, p=.02) was found. Keywords - Cognitive Strategies, A Serious Board Game Design, Higher Education