Multimedia Games and Learning

A Brief Summary of Background and Current Research, and Suggestions for Future Directions

Background Research on the Prevalence of Gaming and the Potential of Gaming as an Environment for Learning

There is consensus that the prevalence of gaming among the tween/teen population is high and is growing. Publications by Pew and the MacArthur foundation provide the context/background for research into the application of games to learning:

· http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_detail.aspx?id=68

· http://digitallearning.macfound.org

While the MacArthur Foundation’s work on the Internet and American life helps establish the basic perimeters of the impact of Internet and technology-based activities have on children’s lives, some MacArthur-funded work has dug deeper into the connection between game-playing (and other technology-mediated) activity and specific dispositions. In particular, civic activity:

· http://www.civicsurvey.org/

The Pew and MacArthur work is largely survey-based research and in some ways is responsive to broader work on games, gaming, and learning. Recent and influential work has come from the University of Wisconsin’s James Paul Gee. In his work, Gee discusses “good” video games and their relationship to learning, literacy and identity:

· http://gameslearningsociety.org/people_geej.php

· http://www.edutopia.org/james-gee-games-learning-video

Gee’s work, along with that of his colleague Constance Steinkuehler (see below), helps chart a direction for what researchers could anticipate as potential connections between multimedia games (“video games”) and learning.

Current Research into Specifically How Gaming Environments Support Learning

Flowing from the background research on the prevalence of gaming and its broadly categorical (and some may say optimistic) applications to learning, other researchers are looking at how games that have been specifically designed as learning activities have impact on users. These games (MUVEs, MMO etc) have been designed as specifically social environments in which students are immersed in real-world type settings. These environments are intended to engage students in simulations of socially complex problems wherein a successful outcome is the result of acquiring and using certain knowledge and skills within the game context. Again, a major feature of these produced environments is that much of the creation of knowledge in these settings and use of skills developed there is highly social in nature. River City MUVE and Quest Atlantis are both initiatives funded largely by the National Science Foundation as test beds for this type of research.

The River City MUVE is created specifically to teach science content and the scientific method within a structured school setting:

· http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/

· http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/research-publications.htm

Quest Atlantis engages students in educational tasks and social interactions, supported within the classroom or other educational setting:

· http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/

· http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/site/view/Researchers#56

These games are based on theories of situated cognition and the social construction/distributed cognition. It is still unknown as to the degree to which gaming experiences can be transferred to the real world. Findings from River City research have centered around the degree to which participation in the environment increases a player’s “self-efficacy” in science. The research has also discussed the conditions under which learning can best occur in these environments – and specifically the role of “expert guidance” within the learning environment. Research from Quest Atlantis has emphasized that learning outcomes are very much connected to the environment in which play occurs. That is, the fact that participation in the virtual environment is not an activity devoid of social context. Quests in this game all occur integrated within a “real world” social context.

Both River City and Quest Atlantis ostensibly focus on how students solve problems in created environment with the strongly implied intention of producing learning outcomes that have impact on “real world” behavior (and there in lies one of the areas where the research is incomplete, in that the connections to the real world have not yet been established). It is important to note that there are other researchers who have somewhat different argument for ultimate outcomes from the game-produced experience, and that is to suggest that perhaps learning that occurs in games can have benefit even if it is not applied to a truly “real world” context. For example, there is discussion of social and civic engagement within “third space” online environments, exploring the extent to which an on-line environment can function as the social setting in which civic engagement is demonstrated. Connie Steinkuehler explores MMOs as form of social engagement within an online context:

· http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler.html

· http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/

In a similar vein, Henry Jenkins suggests that civic skills developed in the virtual world positively disposes people to civic actions in the real world, yet there has been very little empirical evidence to support this.

· http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/publications.html

Some of these threads are tied into the Pew-funded Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) study at Mills College (cited in the previous section).

A review of the current research on outcomes from specifically created learning games highlights

several caveats to understanding this research (some of which point to further research directions for AHCI, see below). These are:

· Studies of learning outcomes related to science may not necessarily applicable to other content areas, such as social studies/history

· The environments studied are situated in “real world” classrooms and groupings of students. It is not clear that similar outcomes would result from informal learning communities that do not have classroom-based supports.

· There has been very little “empirical” research into the actual outcomes – related to content learning or civics - from participation in virtual environments.

Implications for AHCI Projects – Directions for Future Research

Picking up from where existing research leaves off, a challenge for AHCI projects is to investigate the issues of transferability of learning that occurs in the virtual world to real world contexts. Civic engagement is one such area. Do dispositions to civic action that occur in the virtual world (as discussed by CERG, Jenkins, Steinkuehler, etc.) translate into students acting in their own, non-virtual, communities? This is unknown and not entirely predictable based on the research.

The research has shown that scientific inquiry can be developed through participation in a virtual world (River City and Quest Atlantis), but does scientific inquiry translate to development of historical thinking skills? This would seem a reasonable supposition, but it is not something that has been verified through research.

Existing research has highlighted the development of learning skills (inquiry, etc.) through participation in virtual worlds. ACHI projects have a strong orientation to teaching thinking skills along with specific content. It is therefore unknown if AHCI projects are suited to current real-world school environments – with their limitations on time and structures set by content-orient curriculum frameworks. There is no existing research basis for predicting this, and therefore this would be a significant area for examination in any AHCI project evaluation.