This individual papers session, ”Assessment”, will include the following:
Working through Impulse: Assessment of Emergent Learning in a Physics Game
Games may offer a unique opportunity to support and observe intuitive learning that could be foundational for further STEM learning. This paper reports on the game, Impulse, that immerses players in the physical laws of Newtonian motion and discusses our attempts to observe tacit knowledge as it develops through gameplay. This research is mid-stream in the process of identifying a set of cognitive strategies that players develop as they advance in the game and attempting to relate those strategies to developing tacit understandings of underlying science in the game. Researchers are analyzing video from playtesting and mining the associated click data to define predictable cognitive strategies. This project is ripe for discussion about what can be inferred about learning from development of strategies in a game.
Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Elizabeth Rowe, Elisabeth Sylvan, Ryan Baker
Gameplay As Assessment: Exploring In-Game Failure, Success and Learning Using GBA (a Game-Based Assessment Model)
This paper presents an exploration of in-game success, failure, and learning using Game-Based Assessment (GBA). The GBA assessment model is designed to capture relevant information on play and test whether it can constitute reliable evidence of learning. A central challenge for videogames research in education is to demonstrate evidence of player learning. Assessment designers need to attend to the ways in which game-play itself can provide a powerful new form of assessment. Facilitating this, the GBA model has two key layers which build on content-based educational game design: a semantic template that determines which click-stream data events could be indicators of learning; and learning telemetry that captures data for analysis. This study highlights how the GBA was implemented in a stem-cell science learning game, and shows how the GBA demonstrates a relationship between kinds of failure and learning in the game.
V. Elizabeth Owen, Shannon Harris, Dennis Ramirez, Richard Halverson
Participatory Assessment: A Game Design Model for Impacting Engagement, Understanding, and (as Necessary) Achievement
Participatory Assessment is a game design model for obtaining diverse learning and/or social outcomes in innovative learning environments. It fosters participation in socio-technological interactions that ensures individual understanding of targeted concepts. As necessary, the model has also been capable of improving and documenting impact of aggregated achievement. The model emerged from assessment-oriented design studies in several environments, including the Quest Atlantis 3-D virtual environment. This paper introduces the five general design principles that make up DFP, along with the more specific design principles that emerged across give design cycles of the Taiga game in Quest Atlantis. Specific game features are summarized, along with evidence of the impact of those features in the Taiga design studies.
Daniel Hickey
Matthew Berland, Discussant
