How Should School-Based Educational Digital Games Be Evaluated? A Proposed Framework for Examining Experiences Beyond Isolated Metrics

Educational digital games are increasingly incorporated into formal learning contexts. However, their evaluation often relies on isolated outcome measures that provide limited insight into how students experience, interpret, and assess gameplay. This conceptual article proposes a practice-informed critical-participatory framework for the student-centred evaluation of educational digital game experiences. The framework was developed through a practice-informed conceptual synthesis. This synthesis brought together recurring methodological concerns from school-based work and relevant scholarship on game-based learning, student participation, and mixed-methods evaluation. The framework comprises five guiding criteria: pedagogical alignment, learner and contextual suitability, multidimensionality, student participation, and triangulation. It also includes a seven-stage operationalisation extending from the definition of the educational problem to the use of findings for improvement. Structured and process-oriented evidence is interpreted alongside students’ accounts of meanings, difficulties, criticisms, and suggestions. The framework therefore provides an adaptable structure for formative evaluation by relating different forms of evidence to the situated gameplay experience while giving students an explicit but bounded interpretative role. Its feasibility, clarity, and usefulness remain to be examined empirically across educational contexts.