Using Productive Disciplinary Engagement to Design Playable Case Study for Increasing STEM Career Pathways

• In Event: Promoting Productive Disciplinary Engagement Through Textual Practices

Abstract

Purpose
The paper discusses the use of Productive Disciplinary Engagement (PDE) as a design principle for a technology-based alternate reality game (ARG) with the objective of teaching undergraduate students about the collaborative nature of STEM careers as part of an NSF funded research project. The game technology, a Playable Case Study (PCS) presents students with a narrative that unfolds over virtual days (Winter et al., 2020). Balzotti and Hansen (2019) and others have developed and researched multimedia online case studies that simulate an organization virtually. These cases contain a scenario—a case study—that presents a narrative, allowing individual students to take various roles (see Figure 3).
The PCS fictional scenario is considered a text. It uses a transmedia interface where a variety of sub-texts common to workplaces such as chat, email, video, and player-specific datasets simulate a professional environment. The goal of the project is to increase student career awareness and career intent using a PCS designed around a fictional disaster response narrative.
These texts are used to teach more than facts about disaster response, they are used to promote disciplinary authority and accountability to teach about the professions that students are learning about. This paper will focus on the relation between the tasks that students are given in the fictional narrative and the kinds of texts they can use to accomplish those tasks.
Theoretical Framework
Narrative-based problems and transmedia texts are being currently designed in the PCS such that students must collaborate, make attributions, and take action together to solve problems at each of the four levels posited by Munton et al. (1999): individual, interpersonal, intergroup, and organizational. We draw off of the idea that workplace communication is formed within Genre Systems--communicative acts sequenced around purposeful action (Yates, Orlikowski & Okamura, 1999). Additionally, we frame this work in the context of what Gee (2003) has called the “design grammars” of a “semiotic domain” and Reuter and Lahanier-Reuter (2009) and others have termed “disciplinary consciousness.”
Method
This project uses design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004) that involves iterations. Data is collected in this project through a number of methods, including an embedded learning analytics system that records player messages and moves. Our research involves analyzing interview, Likert survey, and focus-group data for field-specific attributions to various “genre systems.” Additionally, there are a range of pre/post assessments that are embedded (Shute et al., 2009) within the technology and appear to players as game questions and tasks, but serve to build a base of data to understand learning.
Significance
This paper provides the symposium with a complementary perspective to the empirical pieces bookending with the literature review this exploration of the use of texts for the development of PDE. We extend previous design research by taking up an important but under-theorized aspect of students’ professional development in STEM fields, their evolving understanding of STEM careers collaborative nature and their intention to consider STEM careers in the future. It will provide the audience with a perspective on PDE with a textual and technical focus.

Authors

• Philip Piety, University of Maryland

• Jonathon Balzotti

• Anisha Singh, University of Maryland - College Park