450 Summary analysing literary and non-literary sources, students always follow the steps ‘describe’, ‘give meaning’ and ‘conclude’. Having reached the last level, students find their own four insights back on the screen. First, they are asked to look for similarities across their insights and then they answer the main question of the game: What is the truth in The dark room of Damocles? After this step, the game is finished. Scores are made visible in the top bar and students can also click on the leaderboard to see their ranking. Results and conclusions The educational design study resulted in a number of theoretical and practical outcomes. The preliminary study on educational games provided insights into the possibilities and impossibilities of digitalization and gamification of historical literature education. The second and third preliminary studies on the approaches of historical literature education, both from a theoretical and practical perspective, resulted in a ‘combination approach’ that combines the four traditional didactic approaches (text-oriented, culturalhistorical-oriented, context-oriented and reader-oriented). Based on these two studies, in a fourth preliminary study I developed a model for literary-historical reasoning. In the fifth preliminary study I applied this method to the novel The Dark Room of Damocles. To determine the content of the assignments, I conducted a study of secondary literature on the novel. Based on this research I formulated four insights that students should work towards in their assignments and a main question about the novel – What is the truth in The dark room of Damocles? – that they should answer based on these insights. During the educational design study, four lesson series were developed that can be consulted on www.redenerenoverliteratuur.nl via the ‘Research’ button on the navigation bar. The results of the students’ assignments and their evaluations of the game were analysed to find out how the game worked for these students, both in terms of learning outcomes and motivational aspects. The study showed that students with different levels of literary competence could adequately use the proposed method to reason about complex questions on a historical literary text. It also showed that the method helped students to precisely formulate their findings. In each research phase, the students’ assignments and evaluations were analysed in the same way. The outcomes with respect to learning how to reason on historical literature showed the same pattern in each phase. They even showed a slight improvement in the last, fully digitalized version, which could also be explained by certain improvements made to the design. The findings lead to the conclusion that reasoning about historical literature using a systematic stepwise approach can help students to connect literary texts, their own knowledge, ideas, and
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