[Audience: An education publication aimed at teachers and administrators in Canadian secondary schools.]
As educators, we are constantly interrogating the efficacy of our teaching methods. Lately there has been a lot of discussion over whether video games have a place in the classroom, and research has brought forth conflicting accounts. Jennifer Jenson, Susan de Castell, Kurt Thumlert, and Rachel Muehrer’s article “Deep Assessment” provides a novel take on this question and come to some enlightening conclusions.
Jenson et al. brought a videogame called Epidemic to two Ontario mid-high schools. The purpose of the game is to teach students about public health. The researchers tested the game with three student groups – a “standard” group, instructed on the game’s teachables through lectures and in-class assignments, an “experimental” group, which would be instructed using the game, and a “baseline” control group which got neither. All three groups received subject-based pre- and post-tests, graded according to standard knowledge retention metrics.
The results were not promising for videogames: The standard group outperformed the experimental group in a conventional testing environment. They retained more information on the subjects they were lectured on, even accounting for their better performance in the pre-test.
However, the standard and experimental groups were also asked to make comics or posters, which were evaluated within Green’s “3D” assessment framework. This looks for understanding on three levels: Operational, cultural, and critical, with a critical understanding signalled by an ability to apply knowledge dynamically to one’s own ends. Only the experimental group demonstrated a critical understanding.
Research on games in education tends to operate within a conventional assessment framework. What the 3D framework demonstrates is that videogames produce forms of knowledge to which traditional evaluations are not sensitive. Videogames cannot be neatly dropped into the classroom, but demand a reflection on what and how we want our students to learn.
