Educational intervention through a gamification proposal to improve adherence to the Mediterranean diet in galician primary school students

Abstract

The objective of this research was to evaluate the benefits of an educational gamification intervention in improving adherence to the Mediterranean diet, as one of the items of healthy habits. A quasi-experimental design of two groups, experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG) with pre-test and post-test measures (after the five-week duration of the proposal) participated. 38 students of the fist cycle of primary education, aged between 6 and 7 years old, belonging to two different schools in Galicia. Descriptive statistics were performed and the distribution of the data was analyzed with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. To verify the existence or not of significant differences between the dependent variables comparison of both groups (experimental and control), a t-student test was performed for independent samples in order to compare the pre-intervention and post-intervention adherence variable. At the end of the improvement in terms of adherence to the Mediterranean diet in the experimental group (increasing by 1.1 points), as well as higher percentage of high adherence in the experimental group (64,7%) after the intervention than in the control group (61,9%). In conclusion, the knowledge generated in the present research makes it possible to understand and approach in greater depth what is a level of adherence to the Mediterranean diet and how a gamification intervention can contribute to improving results. All of this will have to be used by primary education teachers for the planning, design and development of their teaching.