Connecting literacy to game use in the classrooms can be a reach for some people. In their article, Hiller & Spires, provide detailed information on how to map these two concepts. Below is an outline of the information provided.
Teachers can use digital games to enhance student engagement, disciplinary literacy, and content knowledge.
- Are digital games important for schooling?
- Game agenda: games for education and learning purposes
- Games gained support in 2005 by the FAS when they held a summit about games and education
- Education leaders called for accelerated development, commercialization, and deployment of new technologies for learning.
- Key finding of summit: many digital games require players to master skills, such as strategy, analytical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and adaptation to change. These skills are in demand among employers
- Challenge of educators is to prepare youth for high-wage, high-skill jobs. These jobs are non-routine and require problem-solving skills and well-developed communication skills.
- Serious games have benefits in cognitive, motivational, social, and emotional learning.
- What Does Literacy Have to Do With Digital Games:
- Elements of most games include reading and writing
- Games are multimodal
- Combination of different communicative media - music, speech, and writing.
- Offers contextual social situations and relationships
- Shared language and understanding
- Gain fluency in a “specialized language”
- Gaming literacy: includes a host of skills and dispositions
- Create worlds, comprehend, make decisions within dynamic environment
- Navigate complex information streams
- Engage in collaboration
- In general:
- Meaning generation
- Risk taking
- Critical judgement
- Nonlinear navigation
- Problem identification and solving
- Game Literacies VS. Gaming Literacies
- Gaming: support performative learning stance, based on fact that games are dynamic, rule-based systems that offer rules of engagement and stylized forms of interaction
- Games: navigation through world????
- Study on reading skills among game players:
- While playing - average 2 years above grade level
- On standardized tests: 2 years below grade level
- Conclusion: motivation during game improved reading - there is no motivation on standardized tests.
- Struggling readers can perform higher within the game context
- Question: How can we create learning environments for students to be successful?
- What are We Learning From Research on Crystal Island?
- Science classroom - collaboration of Intellimedia (NCSU Computer Science Department) - exploring game-based learning impact on student outcomes.
- Interdisciplinary team - CS, Literacy, Science, Design) - creating two version of educational digital game called Crystal Island.
- Aligns with standards
- 8th grade: Crystal Island Outbreak - narrative-centered learning environment that takes place on a small research camp on a tropical island. Students explore and investigate illness - form questions, generate hypotheses, collect data, and testing. They interact with NPC who offer clues and relevant microbiology facts. Game resulted in increased science content knowledge on pre and post tests
- 5th grade: Crystal Island Uncharted Discovery - action/adventure learning environment set on a volcanic island. Explorers established new life after being shipwrecked. Science adventure - explorers are trying to make contact with the outside world for rescue. Students complete quests (learn problem-solving, map reading, navigation). Students showed increased content knowledge.
- Theoretical Perspectives Related to Crystal Island
- Narrative-centered learning theory
- Rich narrative with disciplinary content. Readers transported through text and taken to another time/place that is compelling and seems real.
- Readers perform the narrative, draw inferences, experience emotions
- Transactional theory
- Reader’s stance is defined as falling on a continuum that moves from aesthetic to efferent
- Efferent: reading in which attention is centered predominantly on what is to be extracted and retained
- Aesthetic: focus on perception through senses, feeling, and intuitions
- Need to balance narrative with content in order to maintain motivation by players/learners
- Cognitive Load Theory
- Schemata is a cognitive structure that makes up an individual’s knowledge base
- Used to identify balance of narrative to science content
- Implications for the Classroom:
- Game-based learning improves engagement and motivation
- Evidence shows that games may also contribute to content learning
- Teachers need to consider:
- positioning disciplinary content as integral to gameplay rather than supplementary
- Design needs to be flexible - students working independently and collaboratively
- A balanced dynamic that includes play as learning
- Learning goals are appropriately assessed and achieved
- Connections to Common Core:
- Taking on roles and identities require specialized language, discourse, and dispositions
- Students are required to read, think, and write
- Building knowledge through text
- Creates awareness
- Conclusion:
- Key challenges confronting the educational community:
- how to clearly articulate why and how games are effective
- How to maximize potential of games and their contribution to learning
- Do games increase learning?
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