Reblogged: An innovative dog needs a creative tail
This piece was originally published by the Macarthur Foundation on their Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog (original link).
How we measure learning helps determine how we teach. So to help children prepare for life in the digital future, we need better tests in the digital present.
I want to start this final entry in my brief stint as guest editor on the Macarthur Spotlight blog by thanking the Foundation for the invitation to join this important conversation, and more important, to thank the readers of the blog for their thoughts and comments.
I look forward to the continuing the discussion here, but also would like to invite those interested in these issues to my research group’s blog at epistemicgames.org, where some of the topics we’ve touched on here (and many others!) are examined in more depth.
I’d like to close this part of the conversation about what we know with a few thoughts on one of the critical issues for research on digital learning: figuring out how we assess what we think children (and adults) are learning from playing games and interacting with other digital tools.
Our current assessments – the standardized tests we read and hear so much about – focus on students’™ knowledge of basic facts and basic skills.
But here’s the problem:
To get good jobs in the digital age, to be informed citizens, to contribute to society, to express themselves, and to lead happy and fulfilling lives, young people need more than basic facts and skills. They need to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about complex problems and issues.
So if we assess games and other new digital tools for learning using standardized tests, what we’ll wind up building are better and better tools to teach the wrong things.
My own work looks at how we can build games where players learn to think about real problems in the same way as people who solve those problems think in the real world.
What we find in building these games is that people who solve real problems use more than just basic facts and skills. Of course, they do need facts and skills. But what our studies show is that learning to think about real problems also means learning the values that guide the use of those facts and skills. It means developing a particular way of thinking–of making decisions and justifying actions. And it means seeing oneself as someone who thinks and acts in these ways.
Measuring real learning, in other words, means more than just testing what someone knows and what they can do. It also means assessing the values they hold, the way they make decisions, and ultimately whether they understand how their knowledge, skills, values, and decision-making process come together to form a way of thinking that they recognize as being both part of a larger community, and part of their own sense of themselves.
In the book How Computer Games Help Children Learn, I describe these ways of thinking as ‘epistemic frames’, which is a useful term because it suggests how these ways of thinking color how someone sees the world: what questions they ask, what problems they see as important, and how they go about answering those questions and solving those problems.
That matters because:
Where a half-century of research in cognitive science shows that basic facts and skills learned by themselves are hard to apply to new problems and situations, our studies show that when people acquire a new epistemic frame from playing a game, they can use it to think in new ways about the real world around them.
So if we want to know whether a game (or anything else, for that matter) has helped prepare someone for creative and innovative thinking in the digital age, epistemic frames are one way to do it.
There may be other ways, of course. But one thing we know for sure is that when it comes to measuring whether someone is prepared for life in the digital age, our current standardized assessments just don’t pass the test.
David,
Your words ring true on a number of different levels. I have just begun to read this blog and I am now compelled to read your book. I suppose that would be one of the desired effects, wouldn’t it? Ha ha…
I have run across (by accident) many of these concepts over the past 10 years while working as a technology support person in school districts. About 8 years ago, I was a member of a team that began work on a rather massive website (KernLearn.net) with the aim, ironically, of helping students practice for the CA High School Exit Exam as well as allow teachers and administrators to track their progress.
One of the problems we had was that we didn’t have enough money to hire the amount of programming talent we really needed to get the job done during 8 weeks in the summer for three years. Purely from a business perspective, I offered the idea that we might be able to find and train the talent very cheaply by looking to our own students as a resource. Next thing I know, I’ve got high school students working with me all the time, sometimes as many as 20 at once.
What I found interesting, and parallel to what you are describing, was that many of the students that I worked with were there because they had a talent and a love for programming and designing websites, and while they were often brilliant in that respect, many had low grades in class and even underperformed on tests. These students were spending an increasing amount of time on my projects and as their school performance suffered, I began to worry that our projects would be seen as a detriment to their education.
This was an external worry. I knew that the truth was that these students were more motivated and excited about what they were doing than they had ever been about anything in their lives. I also knew that they were learning at a blistering pace that would have amazed their teachers if only they could see. Often, we would leave the office at the end of the day with vexing problems on all of our minds, only to find that in the morning I would come in and these students had worked them all out overnight. They didn’t get paid for that – at least not with money. They just loved solving those problems, and they felt that what they were doing was significant.
In the end, nearly all of the students who I worked with that were suffering in their classes and on tests brought their grades up and their scores up. How? Because it was necessary for them to do so in order to keep working with us on our projects, I set up tutoring sessions with them that didn’t tutor them in how to work Math or English problems. My tutoring sessions were a collaborative talk on how to connect what they “had” to do in the classroom with what they LOVED to do. We established that they needed to do this to continue doing what they loved. Then we continually discussed how concepts in English, Math, Science, and Social Studies could help them become a better programmer or designer. We also did everything we could to connect those “dreaded” writing assignments to subjects and ideas that would further our technical projects. The whole project, at least in this way, was a smashing success. I’m really not sure that anyone is actually using the system we built anymore – but who cares? The process transformed many students’ lives, and it transformed me from a “techie” that happened to work for a school district into an educational technology leader.
Thanks for your work and insight into what REALLY moves students AND what we as educators can do to tap in to this movement.
Thanks for sharing that wonderful and inspiring story!
You know, as I write about in How Computer Games Help Children learn, we already know a lot about good learning and good teaching. Part of the power of computer games is that they make it possible to do the kinds of things you describe here–and that we build into the epistemic games we develop–with so many more kids.
I do hope that educators like you–and parents, and politicians, and others–start to get the message and see the power and the potentials of these new technologies. And I hope our work–and yours!–will play a role in making that possible.