Fostering Middle School Students' Multimodal Analysis of Text Through Video Game Play and Writing

• In Event: 67.069 - Sheraton Roundtable 14 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 67.069-4 - The Affordances of Technology in Building and Supporting Literacy

Abstract

The majority of teenagers in the United States (99% of males and 94% of females) play videogames (Lenhart, Kahne, Middaugh, Macgill, Evans, & Vitak, 2008), and educators have begun to leverage the learning principles of videogames (Gee, 2007) to engage and motivate students (e.g., Gerber, Abrams, Onwuegbuzie, & Benge, 2014). Within this study, 31 middle school students (13 6th graders; 18 7th graders) participated in a four-day exploration of videogames as part of their instructional time. Each day, students played videogames 30 minutes and then engaged in 30 minutes of reflective writing, using researcher-provided prompts based upon the GRAD framework (Author 2, 2016), to analyze multimodal symbols in the videogames and the ways those symbols provided feedback and impacted decision-making.

Authors

• Carolyn Stufft, Berry College

• Sam Von Gillern, Texas A&M University - College Station