Instructional Orchestration With Digital Games: Influences on Students' Learning Experiences

• In Event: 47.074 - Learning Experiences: In Inquiry and Perceptions

Abstract

Digital game-based learning offers potential for students to learn scientific concepts in engaging and authentic environments. Critical to leveraging the affordances of these games to create immersive student learning experiences are teachers and the instructional decision-making that they make during implementation. Using an orchestration framework, this study investigated the instructional decisions made by nine high school biology teachers as they implemented a digital game-based learning tool designed to support student learning of genetics. The authors then present two contrasting cases of teacher implementation to characterize how instructional decision-making with the tool either maximized or minimized the potential of the software to support student learning experiences with epistemic-oriented scientific inquiry.

Authors

• Danielle Cadieux Boulden, North Carolina State University

• Eric N. Wiebe, North Carolina State University

• Osman Aksit, North Carolina State University

• Karen Mutch-Jones, TERC

• Santiago Gasca, TERC

• Chad Dorsey, Concord Consortium

• Frieda Reichsman, The Concord Consortium

• James Lester, North Carolina State University

• Trudi Lord