“whatever choice [of education style] we make, we have to make it based on some understanding of what it is we want students to accomplish, and what it is we as educators need to do to get them there.”

Intellectual Property is a critical component of our present and future success in the global economy. The UK’s economic competitiveness is increasingly driven by knowledge-based industries, especially in manufacturing, science-based sectors and the creative industries.

According to some sources, nearly half of the GDP of the United States is based on intellectual property.

The report focuses on copyright issues, and clearly and appropriate policy for protection of intellectual proprety (that also doesn’t constrain the development of new intellectual property!) is critical in a knowledge economy. But so are the processes that lead to the generation of new ideas: innovation and creativity.

Read papers about epistemic games and the future of learning

Browse a list of related books at amazon.com

Read a bibliographic essay on related readings on amazon.com

Additional suggestions welcome in the comments….

Why do people gesture when they talk? Perhaps people gesture for their listeners. After all, listeners can glean information from the gestures speakers produce. However, people also gesture when no one is watching and even when talking to blind individuals. So, perhaps people gesture for themselves. Indeed, children who produce gestures modeled by the teacher during a lesson are more likely to profit from the lesson than children who do not produce the gestures . Gesturing may not only identify children as ready to learn, it may actually help them learn.

The study looked at children learning arithmetic, and showed (basically) that if students do a simple arithmetic problem and point at the relevant parts of the equation, they do better than if they just point, and better still than if they don’t point at all.

Now we always have to be careful making broad generalizations from a small study like this. But it does suggest, as Merlin Donald argues in the Origins of the Modern Mind, and as I talk about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, that the mind is really a palimpsest, with newer forms of thinking–new abilities–written on top of the old. When we solve math problems (a theoretic and literate activity) or tell stories (a linguistic activity), the older systems of communication, gesture and mime, play a role as well.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that video games (a computational activity) use older forms of thinking, particularly storytelling, to communicate their meanings.

The study also highlights an important process in learning. As I wrote in HCGHCL:

Vygotsky argued…. that the way we learn is by doing things with help and then progressively internalizing the process. We take what is first an external, social, and explicit process of solving a problem and gradually we do it on our own…. First we may do it individually but still need to “talk through it”—and surely we all know what it is like to suddenly feel a little foolish talking to ourselves out loud while trying to figure something out. As an undergraduate I spent hours in the library pacing through the stacks and talking to myself while writing term papers, and my daughter still needs to talk out loud to add two-digit numbers. Later we talk through the steps but silently in our heads, which I can see my daughter doing when she adds a single-digit number to a two-digit number. And at some point, when we get really good at solving a problem, we aren’t even aware of how we did it.

Goldin-Meadow’s study shows that we don’t just talk to ourselves in words as we learn to solve complex problems. We use even older and more fundamental forms of communication to solve complex, abstract problems.

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent

That was even lower that the score of 49 percent for Americans overall who took the test.

So, being a curious fellow, I took the test myself, and got a score of 93.94 percent, and I was told that the monthly average when I took it was 78.1 percent. Apparently, Americans got 59.3 percent smarter since the test came out. Hmmm.

This got me thinking: Is my civic literacy really twice that of the average elected official in the US? That seems like a pretty odd thing to conclude, since I’m almost certain sure that I would be pretty lousy as a dog catcher, much less a high elected official. If a test that shows that I am more qualified to be an elected official than many elected officials, then surely there is something wrong with the test, right?

A quick look at the questions on the test sheds some interesting light:

Thirteen of the 33 knowledge questions are taken from previous ISI surveys developed by ISI faculty advisors from universities around the country. Nine of the civic knowledge questions are taken from the U.S. Department of Education’s 12th grade NAEP test, and six from the U.S. naturalization exam. Two new knowledge questions were developed especially for this new survey and three are drawn from an “American History 101” exam posted online by www.InfoPlease.com.

Just to be sure we have this right: Elected officials don’t do well on questions from a 12th grade standardized test and on some other standardized tests, therefore we conclude they don’t know enough civics.

Now I’m not about to defend everything every elected official does in this country, but I don’t think that because I can pass this civic literacy exam I could do a better job myself.

Here’s the problem: The point of those tests was to try to predict, based on a very brief set of simple questions, how well someone would do in the much more complex, real world. But when we find out that the test doesn’t predict well, we don’t throw away the test. We assume that people in the real world must not really know what they are doing.

They fail the test. The test can’t be wrong.

This is, of course, one of the most fundamental fallacies of our regime of high-stakes tests: we take performance on the test as an end in itself, never bothering to ask–much less test–whether the exams actually tell us anything useful about whether students can really do anything useful in the world.

Actually, that is not quite fair. Those studies have been done, and they routinely show that exams don’t give us much useful information. As I discuss in How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

Even students who do well on school tests cannot apply their knowledge to real-world problem solving. For example, one classic set of studies shows that students who have passed a physics course and can write Newton’s Laws of Motion down on a piece of paper still can’t answer even simple problems like “If you flip a coin into the air, how many forces are acting on it at the top of its trajectory?” Which is, of course, a problem that can be solved using Newton’s Laws.

The technical term here is validity. What makes a test valid? How do we know it is testing what we really want it to test?

In the case of this civics test, presumably we’d want to know that there is some relationship between how well someone does on the test and whether or not they really are a good public official, or a good citizen.

But we don’t do that. Passing the test has become the measure that matters, and the results we get are predictably absurd. Like the idea that because I can “name two countries that were our enemies in World War II”, I would be a good elected official. Or rather that because elected officials can’t pass a standardized test, they must not know what they are doing.

A performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The study has not been published yet–the report is from the New York Times, with hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But the results are not actually that surprising.

There have been a number of studies in the last decade that show that what students think about their abilities has an influence on how well they do on tests. In the mid-1990s researchers Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson called the phenomenon the stereotype threat.

The idea is that when students are reminded of a negative stereotype–”math is hard for girls”, for example–the do worse than if they are not reminded about the stereotype. The effects of a stereotype can even be erased:

In a field experiment at a large public university, psychologists Catherine Good, Joshua Aronson, and Jayne Ann Harder administered an extra credit, pre-final practice exam to students enrolled in the terminal course of the most rigorous and fast-paced calculus sequence offered by the university, a course that satisfied degree requirements for math, science, and engineering degrees. These men and women were, by all accounts, in the pipeline for math and science careers. Students in the “gender nullifying” treatment read just a few extra sentences before taking their tests:

What about gender differences? This mathematics test has not shown any gender differences in performance or mathematics ability. The test has been piloted in many mathematics courses across the nation to determine how reliable and valid the test is for measuring mathematics ability. Analysis of thousands of students’ test results has shown that males and females perform equally well on this test. In other words, this mathematics test shows no gender differences.

In the control group, the test was administered under normal conditions, and women and men performed equally. But women who received the “gender nullifying” treatment (reading the statement above) outperformed men.

This is, of course, also part of what makes epistemic games so powerful. Epistemic games give players a chance to see themselves and competent and creative. They make it possible to have a overcome pre-existing stereotypes and replace them with more positive self-images. As I describe in more detail in How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

A key part of this development is acquiring what psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius call possible selves: “individual’s ideas about what they might become, would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.” Possible selves give form to a person’s hopes for mastery, power, status, or belonging and to a person’s fears of incompetence, failure, and rejection. They are images of what we might become, but not generic images. They are images that a particular person has based on his or her own past experiences, hopes, dreams, and worries.

Epistemic games can give adolescents new possible selves that are based on authentic experiences with innovative thinking that matter in the world. Adolescents are in the process of working out exactly the kinds of identity issues that professional practica are all about: becoming a particular kind of person in the larger social world; learning to care about people and issues that matter to society at large; developing expertise and being respected for that expertise. An epistemic game gives players a chance to see themselves as innovative professionals—and, as in any practicum, to be seen by others as professionals.

Seen in this light, having an African American president surely gives African American students a powerful new “possible self”.

Come to think of it, having an African American president gives all of us a powerful new sense of a possible nation.

Hope indeed.