This chapter discusses the details of the included and excluded studies. It begins by reviewing the selection and screening process of the review, resulting in the decision to exclude some studies. Examples of the excluded studies are presented and discussed. Then, the chapter presents the list of the included studies along with the data extracted from them.
The screening and selection process is performed to determine the included and excluded studies for this review. The process consisted of three systematic steps, namely identification, screening, and eligibility (see Figure 1.0 in the previous chapter). The aim of the identification process is to remove any duplicated articles. Since the same articles appeared in two or more different online journal database via different searches and therefore duplicated in different lists, it is crucial to remove duplications before moving forward with the next screening process. This step resulted in the removal of 40 duplicated articles.
The screening process is performed by reviewing the titles and abstracts of the articles. From this process, 26 articles were excluded because the topic reflected through the titles and/or abstracts is not compatible with the purpose of this systematic review. The reasons to exclude the articles fall into five categories: 1) they are not directly discussing Minecraft, 2) they are discussing Minecraft from another context other than education, 3) they do not contain primary studies, 4) they are published in a language other than English, and 5) they are presenting the same case study as another article.
The first category of exclusion is filtering the articles that are not directly discussing Minecraft. Based on the examination of the titles and abstracts, three articles fell into this category. An example of the title and abstract of the excluded article from this category is Saorin, et al. (2015). From the title and abstract, it can be observed that the article discusses the use of games other than Minecraft. The word ‘Minecraft’ is mentioned only in the abstract to describe the characteristic of the other game and also used as a keyword for the article. Thus, the article appeared when a search of the ‘Minecraft’ keyword is performed. However, since the article does not discuss Minecraft, it should be excluded from the review (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 1).
The second exclusion category is for the articles that are discussing Minecraft from another context than education. Eleven articles are excluded on this basis. An example of an excluded article from this category is Repenning, et al. (2014). The title and abstract of the article suggest that the study discusses the computational thinking and the programming aspect of Minecraft, which are not related to the purpose of this systematic review (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 2).
Meanwhile, 10 articles belong to the third exclusion category, which is for the articles that do not contain primary studies. An example of the excluded article from this third category is Lastowka (2011). While the title of the article does not reveal much information about the type of the study, the abstract highlights the study’s methodology, which is a conceptual research rather than a primary study. Since the focus of the systematic review is to gather evidence from primary studies around Minecraft, the articles that do not contain primary studies should be excluded from the review (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 3).
The fourth exclusion category is filtering the articles not published in English, such as that produced by Antequera and Domínguez (2015), which is published in Portuguese. For pragmatic reasons, articles published in another language than English could not be included in the review (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 4).
Finally, the fifth exclusion category excludes one article because it presents the same case study as the other article, which is already included in the study. The article from Cipollone, Schiffter, and Moffat (2014) could be seen as a reproduction of their previously written article (Schifter, Cipollone, and Moffat, 2013). To avoid duplication, this article is removed from the review. The title and abstract of the excluded article are available in Appendix (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 5).
After screening the titles and abstracts of the articles, further selection is conducted to determine the eligibility of the remaining articles to be included in the review. The selection process for eligibility moves beyond examining the title and abstract of the article to a full review of the article in order to scrutinise detailed information. The context, aim, methodology, result and the pedagogical design of the intervention are taken into consideration at this stage of selection. Incomplete information will lead to the decision of excluding the article from the review. This process resulted in two exclusion categories of the remaining articles, which will be labelled as categories six and seven. Category six is for the articles that focus solely on how students interact with Minecraft, while Category seven is for the articles that are providing incomplete information about the research.
Eight articles are excluded because they focus on how students interact with Minecraft. These categories are excluded from the review because they are not suitable to answer the research question, which is focused on how Minecraft is used by teachers to support learning activities in and out of schools. An example of the article that is excluded based on this reason is Dezuanni, O’Mara, and Beavis (2015). The focus of this study is not on how teachers use Minecraft as an instructional tool, but on how students interact with the game itself in a non-educational setting (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 6).
Five articles are excluded because they present lack of information about the research. The lack of information could be related to the aim and purpose of the study, design and methodology of the study, context, and sample of the study, findings of the study, or about the pedagogical design of the intervention in the study. An example of the article that is excluded because of the incomplete information presented is Bos, Wilder, Cook, and O'Donnell (2014). The study is lacking in information about the design and methodology of the research, the context and the sample of the research, and also the findings of the research (see further details in Appendix 2, Category 7).
After going through the three steps of selection and screening process, which resulted in the total of 79 articles being excluded from the review, the list of the included studies could be produced. The final numbers of the included studies are down to nine articles. The details of the nine included studies are presented in the evidence table (see Appendix 3).
4.2 Results of the review
This section presents the main features of the included studies and the findings from the included studies. First, the main features of the included studies, with regards to their year of publication, research sample and context, problems and aims, and designs and methods will be discussed. Next, the findings of the included studies will be summarised under three categorisations of the research problems and aims; namely, 1) Minecraft’s efficacy in education, 2) Minecraft’s uses in education, and 3) Reactions towards Minecraft usage in education. Finally, the analysis of the pedagogical designs and entertainment values of Minecraft GBL from the included studies is reported.
4.2.1 Characteristics of the included studies
Since Minecraft is relatively new, the number of studies that could be located for the purpose of this review is quite limited (9). The studies included in the review were published between 2013 and 2016. Most of the studies (4) were conducted in secondary schools, primary schools (2), and informal education context (2), while a study was conducted in and higher education context (1).
The research problems and aims of the included studies could be classified into three different categories, which are 1) testing the efficacy of Minecraft as an instructional tool (TE), 2) exploring the use of Minecraft as an instructional tool (EU), and 3) investigating reactions of Minecraft usage as an instructional tool (IR). While there are two studies that try to cover more than one aim, the other studies seemed to focus on exploring one of the three categorisations.