Review Of Trends In Serious Gaming For Education-Young
#notesFromPaper #litReview Year : 2012 Tags : GBL educational game literature reviews Authors: Young Slota Cutter Jalette Yukhymenko
games are useful in a lot of fields, but maybe not STEM?
Generally a pretty pessimistic paper on GBL. Talks a bit about how the SEL benefits from games are near self evident
Holy shit the mathematics section starts off savagely. Straight up says most math education research is useless.
And then it has some positive results? Like something showing that goal focused learning was useful and another showing that a game to learn algebra helped learning outcomes? Yeah there are a few games here that helped, so I’m confused what the initial discussion of math games was about.
This paper has similar views towards science education, claiming that there is basically no research indicating its effectiveness. Has some studies where there was no statistical significance, and also rationale behind why that might be the case.
Has some stuff about failures in other science based games.
Watch out, virtual worlds may introduce misconceptions about physics, rather than teaching.
media based language learning is talked about a lot here.
Great for PE
History is good too, especially with thoughtful implementation. One largescale study showed not too much benefit, but potential retention benefits (players may remember it for a long time, despite being just as good right after the lesson.)
edugames don't fit well into the classroom structure
Recommendations for games researchers:
- Figure out the difference between a game and simulation
- Create an edugame repository, esp. for non-commercially-viable games
- Research edugames in use
- Conduct longitudinal studies
- Encourage collaboration between game companies and researchers and politicians
- “Include the metagame”, aka paratexts
- Avoid chocolate covered broccoli
- Understand inter-player interaction as a mode of learning
Post reading Kutub thoughts:
So first and foremost, I’m wondering if this paper is overly critical or possibly outdated. No alarm bells actually went off in my head, but I don’t know the field well enough to say whether this paper found all of the relevant literature and represented it properly. Furthermore, this paper was written in 2012, so I’m wondering if any other work has overturned this paper since then.
Assuming that it is correct (which I feel is reasonable because no alarm bells went off as I read it), I think this is my major takeaway: Games and declarative learning don’t work well together; past studies haven’t shown too much of a benefit. There are a variety of reasons that this might be the case. Games are better for SEL. There are a variety of ways for the field of GUR to improve itself, which I’ve detailed above.
Thoughts from a peer of mine:
No strong evidence for GBL implies GBL doesn’t work. What they are actually pointing out is that the studies done so far are incohesive and thus there is no strong evidence for GBL. Their implications section talks about the upstream possible causes:
- No clear definitions to ensure everyone is measuring the same thing
- No one is studying the same games, so implementation / execution is a confound in all of these studies
- No one is looking longitudinally or qualitatively at the things that are harder to measure
- No one is collaborating with professionals that would be able to help make “good” games (for certain definitions of what good GBL would mean)
- Studies on GBL are trying to isolate and simplify too much, they leave out important sociocultural phenomena that make games work as learning tools
- The games that researchers do make to try to understand GBL are separating game and learning in a way that ruins what they’re actually trying to create
The real takeaway message is the last paragraph of their discussion:
“Instead, applying principles from situated cognition suggests that research should focus on the complex interaction of player–game–context and ask the question, “How does a particular video game being used by a particular student in the context of a particular course curriculum affect the learning process as well as the products of school (such as test grades, course selection, retention, and interest)?” No research of this type was identified in our review, suggesting the missing element may be a more sophisticated approach to understanding learning and game play in the rich contexts of home and school learning.”
This is what they mean when they say “our princess is in another castle” – the research is looking in the wrong direction and asking the wrong questions to understand if GBL is effective.
