Videojuegos frente a fichas impresas en la intervención didáctica con alumnado con necesidades educativas especiales

This article presents a research study whose objective was to find out the perception of primary school teachers who teach directly to students with special educational needs on the didactic implementation, using tablets, of different video games as a resource for working on reasoning skills. To this end, a questionnaire was designed and applied to two samples made up of a total of 823 teachers from 131 schools. The participants were classified according to whether they used video games played on portable devices or printed reasoning cards as their main teaching resource. In order to analyse the data obtained, descriptive statistics were used, paying special attention to measures of central tendency. The comparison between the two groups was carried out by means of mean scores, subjected to Student's t-test. The results obtained showed that teachers perceived advantages attributed to the use of video games in special education. The conclusions indicate that teachers who have implemented video games see improvements with respect to classroom work on reasoning with students with special educational needs in aspects such as the use of time, motivation, performance or the extension of the educational process outside the classroom.

This study explores teachers' perceptions of two pedagogical models used by teachers with students with SEN: gamified and traditional teaching. The authors highlight that "the model that applies the use of video games (mediated by mobile learning) presents, from the teacher's perspective, shows notable advantages for their training process compared to intervention with traditional printed resources" (Sánchez-Rivas et al., 2016: 42). Results show that the implementation of gamified models improves the time management of the sessions compared with traditional models. Despite the fact that, theoretically, the gamified pedagogical model increases the levels of participation in class, the teachers participating in this study did not perceive it as such. Results show should that the use of video games has not improved the perception of direct interaction with the teacher, Sánchez-Rivas et al. (2016: 43) attribute this to "the lack of updating of teachers' professional competence in relation to the gamified pedagogical model". Results also show high levels of motivation recognised by thet students with the gamified model in contrast with the average levels from the traditional model. The authors also point out that the application of the gamified model through mobile learning technology allows students to acquire a higher level of continuity outside the classroom than that obtained with the traditional pedagogical model. Sánchez-Rivas et al. (2016: 44) remark that t"he application of the gamified model through mobile learning technology favours a higher degree of satisfaction compared to that obtained in the traditional pedagogical model".