Enhancing Pre-service Teachers’ Co-design Skills Through Digital Serious Games: A Design-based Research Study

Abstract Recent research in higher education underscores the importance of training pre-service teachers in co-design skills. Cooperative Learning (CL) and peer feedback can play an important role in designing learning environments for the development of these skills. The study proposes an educational intervention using a Digital Serious Game (DSG) into a CL environment. A quasi-experimental design was implemented over two academic years with 435 “Science for Primary School” students (age: 21–48, M = 26.97, SD = 6.30, 94.2% female), divided into intervention and control groups. A Design-Based Research (DBR) framework guided the study, with a structured peer feedback phase introduced in the second academic year. In subgroups, students co-designed educational programs, and ANOVA was used to evaluate the main effects of each independent variable on report quality. Findings indicated that intervention groups outperformed control groups. The first-year control group showed lower performance than the second-year group, likely due to the absence of a structured peer feedback phase. However, no significant differences emerged between intervention groups, suggesting that DSGs may reduce the necessity of a structured peer feedback phase. The study supports the efficacy of DBR in designing effective cooperative educational interventions.