Can typical game features have unintended consequences? A study of players’ learning and reactions to challenge and failure in an educational programming game

It is difficult to motivate learners to seek out and persist at challenging learning tasks where failure is likely. However, in game environments, people seem highly motivated to engage with challenges and respond productively to failure. Many typical game features purportedly enhance intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, which should improve students’ reactions to challenge and failure, which should in turn enhance learning. An experimental study with early middle school students tested these assumptions by comparing a “Full” version of a typical, commercial programming game to a “Minimal” version of the same game where common game features such as narrative, performance metrics, high-quality graphics, and sound were removed. In contrast to our hypotheses, players of the Full Game were less likely to choose coding challenges, were less tolerant of coding failures and gained less coding knowledge. Intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy did not differ between conditions. Correlational analyses showed that failure tolerance and challenge seeking may critically affect learning from educational games. The current study offers an existence proof that some common game features can hinder players' failure tolerance, challenge-seeking and learning, in certain game contexts. Future research should isolate the effects of individual game features, test generalizability and explore which contextual variables influence the findings.     

Games for boys: a qualitative study of experiences with commercial off the shelf gaming

Boys are less likely to receive praise and recognition for good schoolwork, to consider school important, and have fewer opportunities to do the things that they do best (Lopez and Calderon in How America’s boys become psychological dropouts. The gallup blog, 2013). Traditional school cultures have come in conflict with the normal and natural ways that boys behave. As a result, boys have had alienating experiences and high levels of disengagement and lowered academic success in school due to rejection of boy culture, which includes aggressive play, competition, and violent fantasy. The purpose of this study was to explore ways in which we can re-engage boys and enhance their learning opportunities in traditional classroom settings. Boys are drawn to video games, which offer a unique environment where they can engage in learning activities. By taking seriously the indigenous knowledge of this portion of boy culture, we may identify ways in which their expertise can become useful towards common learning goals (Carr-Chellman 2007; Carr-Chellman and Savoy 2004). The current analysis represents the first of a multiphase study that uses an interpretive lens within a CHAT framework to identify relevant learning in Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) games. This phenomenological design identifies learning accounts that map to the United States Common Core State Standards. Our findings suggest that engaged learning can occur for these boys as a result of playing games. COTS games engage boys in normal and natural ways, and consequently can be relevant learning tools that educators, researchers and instructional designers might employ toward traditional learning objectives.     

Love,Socrates, and Pedagogy

A recent report on the UK's higher education system by Lord John Browne exemplifies the dominant trend in education policy initiatives toward a focus on education primarily for employment and for the acquisition of skills. In this essay, Alison Assiter argues that such an entrepreneurial approach neglects essential aspects of the processes of teaching and learning. She draws on the work of Hannah Arendt, who saw the proper role of education as imparting the love of a subject, to critique the view expressed in Browne's report. Assiter then uses Søren Kierkegaard's reflections on education to further develop Arendt's perspective. While Kierkegaard certainly would have agreed with Arendt that teaching is a process of inspiring in students the love of a subject, he went beyond this to suggest that teaching also must encourage students to believe they can make a difference in the world and must instill in both teachers and students a commitment to engaging in a mutual process of development.     

Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: self-evaluation as bad faith

ABSTRACT

Self-evaluation, a devolved, rigorous form of teacher inspection, has increasingly been promoted in educational circles as a way to balance both teacher autonomy and accountability. Such balancing acts help to alleviate anxiety around inspection, for the teacher who would otherwise face a visit from an inspector, and for the public who are concerned about self-evaluation being less objective. Using the Irish policy of self-evaluation, this paper will first explore the evidence-based approaches and the appropriation of a ‘language of evaluation’ that are inherent to so-called low-stakes accountability systems. In part, such mechanisms are used in order to alleviate anxiety. The anxiety that self-evaluation focuses on, however, corresponds only to aspects of teaching that are conducive to measurement, and therefore refers solely to what may be called an anxiety of performativity. Furthermore, its attempts to repress an anxiety of performativity ironically fails to acknowledge a more fundamental form of anxiety that teaching as a ‘performance’ involves. Using Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’, this paper will ultimately argue that teaching inevitably involves an element of anxiety that should not be repressed but rather should be lived and worked with well, something which self-evaluation in its current form fails to capture.     

The longitudinal association of childhood school engagement with adult educational and occupational achievement: findings from an Australian national study

The research investigated the association between school engagement and adult education and occupation outcomes, within the context of a 1985 Australian longitudinal national cohort study of the factors affecting children's long‐term health and well‐being. School engagement may be more modifiable than other factors related to academic success, such as academic attainment, which is influenced by family background. A School Engagement Index was constructed using questionnaire items on school enjoyment and boredom. Related school engagement items included learner self‐concept, motivation to learn, sense of belonging, participation in school or extra‐mural activities, and enjoyment of physical activity. In 2004–2006, participants (aged 26 to 30 years) reported their highest level of education achieved and current occupation. Potential covariates included age, sex, markers of socio‐economic status in childhood, personality and school‐level variables (i.e., number of students, single sex versus co‐education; government, private or independent). Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds of achieving post‐compulsory school education and achieving higher status occupations. Findings revealed that each unit of school engagement was independently associated with a 10% higher odds (OR 1.10 95% CI 1.01,1.21) of achieving a post‐compulsory school education. Maternal education, self‐concept as a learner, motivation to learn, all also significantly predicted achieving post‐compulsory school education. School engagement was found to mediate the association between the personality characteristic of agreeableness and education outcomes. Higher school engagement was also independently associated with achieving higher status occupations 20 years later (OR 1.11 95% CI 1.03, 1.20). Importantly, this was independent of a host of background factors.     

Cascading the use of Web 2.0 technology in secondary schools in the United Kingdom: identifying the barriers beyond pre-service training

This paper reports on research that took place at two universities in the United Kingdom, over two years. The research focuses on the use of Web 2.0 technology, specifically blogs, with pre-service teachers, both during their university programme and the first year of teaching as full-time newly qualified teachers (NQTs). The purpose of this research was to add to a developing body of knowledge by identifying whether technology used by pre-service teachers during their training course can be cascaded into their practice once qualified. Key findings identify a number of enablers and barriers to cascading technology in the classroom; these include curriculum time, pupil skills and support. The research concludes that early professional support and development should continue during the early years of teaching and assumptions about new teachers as champions of cascading innovative use of Web 2.0 technologies into their practice as NQTs may be over-optimistic.     

The effects of anxiety and strategic planning on visual search behaviour

The past decade has witnessed increased interest in the visual search behaviour of athletes. Little is known, however, about the relationship between anxiety and eye movements in sport performers or about the extent to which athletes' planned and actual visual search strategies correspond. To address these issues, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, eight expert female gymnasts were presented with three digital slides of a model performing a skill that is known to be anxiety-provoking in this sport--namely, the 'back flip' on the beam. By varying the height of the beam and the presence or absence of safety mats, the slides differed in the amount of anxiety that they elicited vicariously in the viewer. In the study, the gymnasts were asked to imagine themselves in the position of the depicted model and to describe the anxiety that they felt. As they viewed the slides, their eye movements were recorded. As predicted, anxiety was associated with an increase in the number of fixations to peripheral areas. In addition, the more 'threatening' slides elicited significantly more fixations than the less feared images. In Study 2, the plans of 15 equestrian performers (5 expert, 5 intermediate and 5 novice) were elicited as they engaged in a virtual 'walk' around a computerized show-jumping course. Contrary to expectations, the congruence between intended and actual search behaviour was not significantly greater for expert riders than for the less skilled groups. Also, the fact that the top riders allocated more fixations to slides than the less skilled performers challenged the prediction that expertise would be associated with economy of visual search. Finally, as expected, the expert riders were significantly less dependent on the overall 'course plan' than the intermediate and novice equestrian performers when inspecting the fences.