I gave a presentation at my work today (Kognito Interactive) about my experience at the GLS a few weeks ago. The aspect that the conference left me thinking about most is the idea of assessment in education and in game simulations. In a sense, assessment is the solution to and obstacle blocking educational reform. After the jump, the text from my presentation:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
GLS & 21st<\/sup> Century Assessment<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The world is shifting from hard skills that are based on testable knowledge toward a world where people need soft skills to succeed. Retaining information is no longer the first step toward being a successful student, but rather being able to access and assess the information. Education is moving from traditional pedagogies that boast a clear mapping of testable content to what James Paul Gee describes as situated, sociocultural education \u2013 providing spaces for learning that is built by doing, through experience, and sharing knowledge in collaborative form. He sees the needs of the learner becoming elements like: knowing how to learn, knowing how to problem solve, being able to attach meaning to content, being tech-savvy, learning to be collaborative, receiving encouragement to innovate and create, develop model-based thinking, and knowing how to retrieve and understand information. This is not to say Gee believes things like reading or language are going away. On the contrary, he argues language will become more complex. <\/span><\/p>\n The question is: how do you convince schools to realize this paradigm shift? There are so many stakeholders in education \u2013 students, teachers, administration, parents, politicians, etc \u2013 part of the problem for developing real educational reform is getting all of these parts moving in the same direction, at the same time. The answer is assessment. It is the cure and obstacle for educational reform. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Assessment in education to date is primarily based on psychometrics and standardized testing. These forms of assessment ignore the sociocultural makeup of the student, which is to say it ignores their values, their meanings, and their expectations as a learner. It ignores the unique path each learner has to building their knowledge. In fact, the one-size fits all approach often creates hopelessness for the poor testing student. <\/span>Grades and testing scores can inflict competition, ambiguity, and provide no formative feedback to the actual learner. <\/span><\/p>\n But that\u2019s not to sat assessment is wrong. It\u2019s just being practiced in the wrong way. The fact is, proper assessment can provide the learner with valuable feedback that can inform their decisions and also motivate their strive for becoming educated. James Paul Gee argues for a 21st<\/sup> Century assessment that measures skills necessary for problem solving, specifically adaptive ability, lifelong learning habits, and the ability to adopt new technologies and ways of understanding from multiple cultural perspectives. He believes digital media offers a bridge for the assessment gap between student and the education establishment. He writes, \u201cDigital media have the potential to offer deep assessment of these skills across virtual worlds and to help advance teaching by documenting learners\u2019 moment-by-moment progress.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n A game or simulation can watch the player constantly, chart growth, monitor decisions, and ultimately provide the player with the ability to assess themselves and build self-awareness. It\u2019s like watching yourself in a mirror and realizing you need to correct your posture. The student can actually witness themselves learning, which motivates them to learn more through the realization of seeing what they are capable of. As Gee stressed at the conference, don\u2019t take the learner out of the assessment. Let the student gain from it. This sort of education fosters long-term change and creates a hunger for lifelong learning, not to mention it teaches the student how to learn. Gee continues, \u201cTheir problem-solving in the digital world would itself be a deep assessment of skills, including collaboration and the applications of these skills across other virtual worlds, and the real world would be a test of transfer.\u201d The best assessment will be the kind that provides evidence to the teacher of how to better adapt the teaching to the needs of the student. <\/span><\/p>\n According to the University of Wisconsin Division of Information Technology\u2019s Engage Project, educational games and simulations offer the following contributions to learning:<\/span><\/p>\n 1) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Simplify reality<\/span><\/p>\n 2) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Offer experience that is personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological, all at the same time.<\/span><\/p>\n 3) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Students are guided and supported by the knowledge built into the virtual characters and worlds; to succeed they must apply the epistemic frame (activities, values, and ways of thinking)<\/span><\/p>\n 4) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Skills and knowledge of expertise are distributed between the virtual characters and the real-world students<\/span><\/p>\n 5) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Provide a model of learning through meaningful activity in virtual worlds as preparation for meaningful activity in our real world<\/span><\/p>\n 6) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Facts and information evolve naturally out of the experience<\/span><\/p>\n 7) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Novices learn the ways experts make sense of problems and achieve success<\/span><\/p>\n 8) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Develop situated understanding, integrating ways of knowledge, ways of doing, ways of being, ways of caring, and ways of thinking to become an expert<\/span><\/p>\n 9) <\/span><\/span><\/span>Experts learn ways to reexamine critical junctures where their understanding is incomplete or ineffective in dealing with new or problematic situations and to then reorganize their ways of thinking to face atypical problems and achieve success<\/span><\/p>\n The principles of the need for in-game assessment are: watching the player constantly, charting growth, monitoring decisions, and ultimately providing the players with the ability to assess themselves and build self-awareness. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I gave a presentation at my work today (Kognito Interactive) about my experience at the GLS a few weeks ago. The aspect that the conference<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":298,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}