Traditional Assessment for Nontraditional Pedagogies: Teachers Designed Reflective Practices That Augment Embedded Game-Based Assessments

• In Event: 43.015 - Game-Based Assessment: How Has the Field Matured Over the Past 10 Years?

Abstract

As the field of game-based assessments has matured, so have some teachers’ methods connected adapting commercial off-the-shelf games to meet curricular goals and objectives. This poster shares findings from a qualitative study designed to learn how games were used in classrooms of expert teachers in a game-based learning affinity space. This study parsed commonalities and themes in classrooms that were deeply embedded with game-based learning as a technique. It analyzed the intersection of expert teaching and “good” video games, those that “are crafted in ways that encourage and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking” (Gee, 2007, p. 38).

Teachers were selected to participate based on theoretical sampling, a method often connected to grounded theory. The smaller sample size, sometimes part of grounded theory studies (Charmaz, 2014), was not intended to represent a larger population. Theoretical sampling pertains “only to conceptual and theoretical development of [your] analysis; it is not about representing a population or increasing the statistical generalizability of your results” (Charmaz, 2014, pp. 198–199). Grounded theory is an iterative and inductive approach often used for qualitative research studies in which data are compared until a hypothesis emerges that can be used to explain the observed phenomenon (Charmaz, 2014).

Findings indicated that the observed teachers used digital games not as didactic teaching machines, but rather as a centerpiece for instruction, more like books, videos, or documentary film. Games became “high-quality curriculum materials,” enabling students to access curriculum (Darling-Hammond, 2013, pp. 14–15), used as “digital texts” (Shaffer, Nash, & Ruis, 2015, p. 10). Teachers enabled students to associate “words with images, actions, experiences, or dialogue on a real or imagined world” (Gee, 2007, p. 105), along with the epistemic grammar from the games, to facilitate an understanding of words because they experienced them in a situated context (Gee, 2007; Shaffer, 2012). Teachers then played “the role of tutor and explicator, helping students make sense of their mediated experiences, selecting additional experiences, and weaving together a coherent curriculum from an increasingly large array of choices” (Shaffer et al., 2015, p. 11).

Each observed teacher designed reflection-on-action strategies as a method for students to apply the semiotic grammar learned in a game’s world to settings outside of the game’s space (Schön, 1983). As a point of comparison, about a quarter of K8 game-using teachers surveyed in the national Level Up Learning survey (n = 513) reported that they “created their own tests/quizzes (30%) or held whole-class discussions (31%) to measure student learning through gameplay; or interpreted students’ game scores as evidence of their knowledge on topics covered in other formats (39%)” (Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014, p. 19). Thus, as the field of game-based assessments evolves and matures, it should focus not just on embedded evidence-centered design and stealth assessments in games (Almond, Mislevy, & Steinberg, 2003; Gushta, Mislevy, Rupp, & Shaffer, 2010; Shute, 2011), but also the methodologies of how teachers design their own assessments.

Author

• Matthew Farber, University of Northern Colorado