Game Boards as a Strategy for Strengthening Attention Span and Working Memory in Group A Children Aged 4–5 Years: A Classroom Action Research Study Using the Kemmis and McTaggart Model

Abstract

Focus and working memory are routinely invoked in early childhood classrooms as though they were self-evident, directly observable traits rather than constructs that require operational definition before any claim of change can be defended. This classroom action research, following the Kemmis and McTaggart model across two cycles, examined whether structured board game sessions shifted attentional persistence and short-term recall in ten children aged four to five in a Group A kindergarten class in Bandung, Indonesia. Data was collected through participant observation, teacher interviews, and documentation across two cycles of six sessions each. Results indicated a rise in on-task attentional behavior, with ninety percent of children meeting the study's attentional criterion by the second cycle, alongside gains in sequential recall of game rules and turn order. These findings converge with recent international evidence that structured play activates executive processes relevant to attention and working memory. The design, lacking a control group and relying on a small, non-randomized sample, cannot isolate the intervention's causal contribution from maturation or teacher scaffolding, a limitation the discussion treats as an occasion for methodological honesty rather than rhetorical minimization. The article argues that board games should be treated as a family of mechanically distinct interventions whose cognitive demands must be specified before causal claims are warranted, and that collapsing this family into a single undifferentiated pedagogical tool is a category error common to the wider early childhood literature