Understanding How Context of Game Play Affects Game-Based Assessments

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

Abstract

What happens in a game itself is as important as what happens outside the game in the classroom or home space, or what Gee (2007) refers to as the “big G Game.” Just as assessments taken in different contexts may have different validity, the same is likely true for games, except the issue is potentially even more complicated. Due to the history of games in the entertainment industry, students may bring perceptions formed from playing games outside the classroom into their classroom gameplay. This is potentially an issue unique to games as opposed to other forms of assessment.

One approach to understanding the big G Game is to characterize all of the student learning pathways that occur in and around a game (BrainPOP, 2017). In theory, this seems great to do, but in practice most games live in isolated contexts and it’s difficult to know what a student was doing before or after the game. Although surveys to teachers or in class case studies can somewhat get at learning pathways (Fishman et al, 2015), such studies often are overly general in characterizing such pathways, and may only catch the pathways defined by teachers. For example, a teacher might have assigned a student to watch an online movie, and then play a game. But from a student’s perspective, they may have engaged in further research after the movie before jumping to the game, or stopped the gameplay to refer back to the movie, or watched the movie at school and then a day later played the game at home. The actual pathway and context of the game might differ greatly from what is assigned.

In practice, many games tend to be isolated islands of content, unconnected from related educational content or other games. In contrast, GameUp is a game-based learning platform run by BrainPOP that contains over 150 vetted educational games from over 50 different organizations. Additionally, all games on the platform are aligned and directly connected to related learning content on BrainPOP, which contains over 825 educational topics. An analysis of learning pathways between BrainPOP and GameUp can yield insights into the nuances of student learning pathways around games, and how different pathways affect the game’s use as an assessment tool. GameUp is relatively unique in that it contains both teacher-directed and student-directed uses of games, allowing nuanced analyses into how the context of gameplay can affect assessment.

This poster will focus on three cross–subject assessment games developed by BrainPOP (Sortify, TimeZoneX, and Meaning of Beep) and use anonymous student log data to address the following three questions: What are the common student pathways before and after an assessment game? How do game assessments compare to more traditional assessments? And finally, how are the answers to either of the two previous questions affected by whether a gameplay session is student-directed or teacher-directed?

Author

• Kevin Miklasz, BrainPOP