http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/hatfield_dissertation_print_final.pdf

This study examines a 21st century theory of learning and cognition, Epistemic Frame Theory, which argues that expertise, such as the kind involved in complex thinking and problem solving, fundamentally involves diverse and dynamic connections between different forms of knowing and acting, guided by the norms and principles of a particular community.

In this dissertation, I consider the challenge of measuring and assessing epistemic frames using a new measurement tool, epistemic network analysis (ENA), which focuses on the patterns of relations between knowledge and other aspects of expertise as they are mobilized together in the discourse of complex practice.
The context for this investigation is science.net, a computer-supported role playing game in which young people take up the role of reporters-in-training and educational researchers take up the role of mentor editors in a simulation of a professional journalism practicum designed to help players begin to think like professional journalists.

Through epistemic network analyses of mentor and player discourse this experiment suggests the connections between the particular ways of knowing, doing, being, caring, and justifying that constitute an epistemic frame can be quantified and measured. In turn, this means epistemic frame theory can be tested, providing a more rigorous basis for the design of learning environments to better prepare young people for the complex demands of the future.

http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/publications/workingPapers/Working_Paper_No_2010_10.php

As bloggers and mobile phone eyewitnesses increasingly supplement the “news,” understanding how professional journalists develop their expertise is more important than ever. This paper examines the learning processes within an intermediate-level reporting practicum course. Using epistemic network analysis, the authors explore emergent relationships within developing journalistic expertise. Understanding these relationships should be useful for journalism education as well as the design of research on learning environments.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/graesser-automentor-0410141.pdf

We identified the speech act categories and clusters of discourse comments of journalism mentors who interact with students editing news stories. Two important speech act categories are evaluations and suggestions. Latent semantic analysis and principal components analyses helped us discover clusters of comments involving evaluations and suggestions. The comments of mentors were also significantly aligned with epistemic frame elements that motivate the comments at a deeper level of discourse and pedagogy. Such alignments were validated by logistic regression analyses on a sample of hand-coded judgments of the frame elements. There was some modest transfer from a journalism practicum corpus to a game corpus. These analyses provide an important first step in building a virtual AutoMentor for multiparty epistemic games.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/hatfield-ICLS2010-review.pdf

As bloggers and mobile phone eye-witnesses increasingly supplement the ‘news,’ it is more important than ever to understand how professional journalists develop their expertise. In this paper, we examine an intermediate level reporting practicum course to explore the learning processes therein. Using a new method called Epistemic Network Analysis, we also explore emergent relationships within developing journalistic expertise. Understanding these relationships should be useful for journalism education as well as the design of research on learning environments.

Epistemic games have been developed to help players develop domain-specific expertise that characterizes how professionals in a particular domain reason, communicate, and act (Shaffer, 2006; Shaffer & Bagley, 2009). Grounded in a sociocultural and sociocognitive approach to learning, epistemic games are designed to foster situated learning that leads to data structures with high levels of dependencies. As one might expect, traditional measurement models struggle to accommodate such contextual dependencies, especially when data are collected at smaller scales and epistemic network analysis (ENA) has been developed to provide a practically feasible modeling alternative (e.g., Rupp et al., 2009; Shaffer et al., in press). In this paper, we describe a research program that addresses key statistical considerations for modeling data from epistemic games using ENA with an eye toward representing different learning progressions of players within such games. Current approaches for representing learning progressions using ENA are juxtaposed with approaches for simulating such data using particular statistical constraints.

In this paper we look at educational assessment in the 21st Century. Digital learning environments emphasize learning in action. In such environments, assessments need to focus on performance in context rather than on tests of abstracted and isolated skills and knowledge. Digital learning environments also provide the potential to assess performance in context, because digital tools make it possible to record rich streams of data about learning in progress. But what assessment methods will use this data to measure mastery of complex problem solving, the kind of thinking in action that takes place in digital learning environments?

Here we argue that one way to address this challenge is through evidence-centered design: a framework for developing assessments by systematically linking models of understanding, observable actions, and evaluation rubrics to provide evidence of learning. We examine how evidence-centered design can address the challenge of assessment in new media learning environments by presenting one specific theory-based approach to digital learning, known as epistemic games, and describing a method, epistemic network analysis, to assess learner performance based on this theory. We use the theory and its related assessment method to illustrate the concept of a digital learning system: a system composed of a theory of learning and its accompanying method of assessment, linked into an evidence-based, digital intervention. And we argue that whatever tools of learning and assessment digital environments use, they need to be integrated into a coherent digital learning system linking learning and assessment through evidence-centered design.

This short video gives an overview of our work on Urban Science and other epistemic games as part of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning Project and the National Science Foundation.

In these games, players have a chance to learn 21st century skills by playing as urban planners, engineers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge economy.

I suppose next we’ll need to make an epistemic game about making epistemic games….

In the frequently rancorous debates of high-stakes politics, it’s easy to think – why shouldn’t they just shut up? – and to forget just how important discussion with people who disagree can be. At AERA last month Diana Hess, an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provided a useful reminder, sharing her latest work studying high school students engaged in ‘deliberative democracy.’ As Mansbridge argues, ‘Democracy involves public discussion of common problems, not just a silent counting of individual hands. And …, the discussion can some times lead the participants to see their own stake in the broader interests of the community. … Thus a ‘deliberative democracy’ does not simply register preferences that individuals already have; it encourages citizens to think about their interests differently.’

To be successful like this, young people learning to engage with different perspectives need the right kind of context and guidance. Hess’s observations confirm this for high school social studies classes, but it is also an important aspect of games designed for civic engagement. In epistemic games, for example, the framework of working as a professional on important community issues can provide just this kind of guidance for young players. Professional journalists, for example, are trained to seek out and understand opposing viewpoints to responsibly inform the public (e.g., journalism.net). Professional urban planners are trained to seek out and understand the diverse and typically conflicting desires of community stakeholders to recommend compromises that best reflect that community (e.g., Urban Science). And in all of the epistemic games based on these professions, players are encouraged to see themselves as important members of the community and to develop new ways of thinking about community issues.

As Hess’s and Mansbridge’s work so powerfully points out, learning to engage with, rather than avoid, different perspectives is what Democracy is all about. Put another way, debate is good. It is rancor that is bad. And good games-like good civic curricula of any kind-help young people learn the skills they need to engage in the former and avoid the latter.

A common practice for initiating such games, and the reference for the article’s title, is to declare on a web page, for instance, that ‘This is not a game,’ (TING) while simultaneously embedding the opening clues within that same web page. As McGonigal points out, this express denial becomes “one of the most intriguing and lingering effects of TING immersion tactics: a tendency to continue seeing games where games don’t exist.”

ARGs blur the boundaries between what is in-game and what is outside the game by replacing the separate play-space many games use (e.g., soccer field, videogame console), with a particular mindset through which everyday communications tools can become components in the game regardless of where they happen to be located. In turn, as McGonigal points out drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, these games “provide ‘a model, a detailed pattern to follow, a foundation’ for later application to serious real world situations.”

By recruiting non-play spaces and things into the service of play, these games emphasize how game play can come down to a decision between different frames of mind.

While avoiding potentially creepy yet common ARG techniques like having game characters calling or emailing players at home, epistemic games are all about equipping young people with different frames of mind. Our studies show that engaging in professional practices within these games helps players think like professionals beyond the games.

So – to the extent that we want to engage players in these kinds of frame shifts, indeed – this is not a game!