IMPROVING ATTENTION WITH VIDEOGAMES? A CASE STUDY

The young generations called "digital natives" dominate aspects of daily life related to the use technology, in general and particularly, with video games. The integration of this resource in the teaching-learning processes helps the development of digital competence as well as favoring other relevant aspects for the person integral formation. The objective of this paper is to show that the use of a video game can help to improve the cognitive processes of students of Primary Education with learning difficulties. For that, a quasi-experimental methodology based on a pretest and posttest is based, with the participation of six children. The evolution of cognitive processes evolution with the battery DN:CAS is recorded, an intervention program based on the use of video games is applied, and control sheets and field notes are used to check its improvement. In the data analysis, it is verified if there are significant differences between the pretest and the posttest by means of Student's T. The results show statistically significant improvements in attention and in the complete scale of cognitive processes that measures planning, simultaneous processing and successive processing. These improvements were corroborated by the qualitative notes. It is concluded that the participants support the significance of the integration of video games for learning as well as their possibilities in improving cognitive processes. However, the program requires prior training as part of longitudinal research, with a greater sample size.