2026-10-12T10:32:40Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33771442 2026-09-15T05:28:16Z category_129 portal_316 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Supplementary file 1_Developing social-cognitive skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing children through a gamified digital intervention: a multisite class-level quasi-experimental study.docx Zhanar Adirbekova (24912310) Nadezhda Zhienbayeva (24912313) Nurgul Serikbayeva (24200147) Madina Tussupbekova (24200141) Saltanat Meiramova (24912316) Education deaf and hard-of-hearing children digital intervention gamification social-cognitive performance special education transfer Introduction<p>This multisite, class-level quasi-experimental study examined whether a 12-week gamified digital intervention was associated with greater improvement in social-cognitive performance among 120 deaf and hard-of-hearing primary-school children from 12 classes in three special education schools in Kazakhstan, compared with an active non-digital programme.</p>Methods<p>The intervention combined visually accessible social scenarios, facial-expression and branching-decision tasks, immediate corrective feedback, repeated attempts, progressive difficulty, and teacher-guided discussion; the comparison condition covered equivalent social-emotional content and instructional time through non-digital activities. Pre-test and post-test data were collected using a study-specific social-cognitive assessment battery, six non-digital transfer scenarios, and structured classroom and break-time observations. Linear mixed-effects models accounted for repeated measurements, class-level clustering, and study site, with small-sample-corrected inference.</p>Results<p>The experimental group showed a greater increase in the primary social-cognitive composite outcome than the comparison group [adjusted difference = 2.48, 95% CI (0.70, 4.25), p = .011; dDiD = 0.58]. Significant adjusted differences were also found for emotion recognition, social-situation interpretation, and performance-based transfer, whereas social decision-making did not remain significant after multiplicity correction and observed social behaviour showed no clear between-group difference.</p>Discussion<p>The findings provide preliminary evidence that an accessible gamified format may support structured social-cognitive performance, although short-term behavioural generalisation was not established.</p> 2026-09-15T05:28:16Z Dataset Dataset 10.3389/feduc.2026.1947526.s001 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Supplementary_file_1_Developing_social-cognitive_skills_in_deaf_and_hard-of-hearing_children_through_a_gamified_digital_intervention_a_multisite_class-level_quasi-experimental_study_docx/33771442 CC BY 4.0