The educative value of simulations has been proven over 40 years of research, but their widespread use and application in educational settings is limited because of issues related to adoption, design and development, sustainability, cost, and innovation (Schank, 2001; Klopfer et al., 2009). There remain vast and sophisticated applications that other disciplines use to improve learning and understanding scarcely imaginable even 10 years ago.
However, as Zapata-Rivera and Bauer (2012) point out,
…[n]ew technologies, including video games, can play an instrumental role in transforming current educational and assessment practices by facilitating the creation of environments where students can acquire and demonstrate 21st century skills because they support communication, collaborative problem solving and measure conceptual understandings, cognitive processes and skills progressions as students play them” (p. 152).
Scardamalia et al. (2012) provide a thorough summary of the many ways in which current technologies can be leveraged to design “richer, deeper, wider ranging learning activities and assessments” (p. 224). For example, they can provide for, or support, authentic and dynamic environments, access to collections of information sources, forms of collaboration, multiple representations of phenomena, and the broad simulation of tools (ibid; USDoEd, 2010)
In particular, the last decade has seen a rise in the development, use, and testing of virtual and simulation-based game environments in educational contexts, sometimes referred to as “serious games,” which can be broadly defined as games with a purpose beyond play that are designed to explicitly educate or train (Shute, Ventura, Bauer and Zapata-Rivera, 2009; Sawyer and Smith, 2008). Such games have received extensive treatment in the literature regarding the ways in which they provide powerful learning environments that can potentially transform educational practices because they can both teach and assess,
…competencies that we believe are important and that are aspects of thinking highlighted in cognitive research [because they] make visible sequences of actions taken by learners in simulated environments; model complex reasoning tasks; and do it all within the contexts of relevant societal issues and problems that people care about in everyday life
(Vendlinski and Stevens, 2002, as cited in USDoEd, 2010, p. 27).
To illustrate, one popular type of serious game is a MUVE (Multi-User Virtual Environment). In MUVEs multiple-player participants:
1) simultaneously access a virtual context (representative of the real-world, or at times a fantastical world) as avatars6;
2) interact with and use digital representations of real-world artifacts and tools;
3) interact and communicate with other participants and “agents7”; and
4) engage in collaborative activities with other player-participants to solve problems similar to, or representative of, those found in real-world contexts (Ketelhut et al., 2008; Dieterle, 2009).
MUVEs such as Quest Atlantis (atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu) and River City
(muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/) facilitate inquiry and the development of higher order thinking skills by requiring students to access and apply disciplinary content and conceptual tools to solve complex, socially significant problems such as those
encountered by doctors, scientists or mathematicians in an immersive environment (Barab et al., 2011; Ketelhut et al., 2008; Dieterle, 2009; Shute et al., 2009). MUVEs have been designed to engage students in a range of learning activities, including those related to scientific and mathematical concepts and understanding, historical-political situations, computer programming and collaboration, social and moral development, and socially responsive behavior, as well as adult learning in the fields of graduate distance education and in pre- and in-service teacher training and preparation (Dieterle, 2009).
In these game environments, students “experience immersion within a virtual world because of features such as interactive stories that provide context and clear goal structures for problem solving” (Shute et al., 2009). Schank (n.d.) refers to this as a “story-centered curriculum” where students feel connection because it relates to authentic aspects of the world they live in. They are immersed as active agents who play multiple authentic and valuable roles in furthering a narrative as they learn how to do something through encountering complex situations that demand the learning and application of
inter-disciplinary knowledge and understanding. As described by Baker et al. (2008), immersive environments are attractive because:
…they can provide the technical means to (a) create a range of task scenarios for students, from well-defined problems with one correct answer to open-ended problems with multiple solutions, all within the same setting; (b) require students to reason while demonstrating their understanding of the content; and (c) respond dynamically to students’ interactions with the simulation (Baker and O’Neil, 2002) (p. 7).
Shaffer and Gee (2012) argue that such immersive experiences are good for learning because the games that provide them are built around problem solving and inherently require and assess key deeper learning competencies. By design, they integrate learning and assessment, “introduce complex concepts when they are needed,” and keep players engaged and motivated, because they are presented with “a sequence of challenges that gradually increase in difficulty, so players are constantly working at the cutting (and most exciting) edge of their abilities” (ibid, p. 212). Unfortunately, prominent and well-
intentioned educational practice perpetuates a disconnect between the kinds of knowledge students learn in school and the kinds of situations in life and work wherein this
knowledge may be useful (Mislevy, 2010) - students are too often asked to “use the tools of a discipline” without an understanding of how practitioners use them (Brown et al., 1989).
Broadly speaking, research suggests the affordances that serious games provide can support a better understanding of the relationships between communication activity, collaborative problem solving, and how groups co-construct knowledge and
understanding. First, they provide rich environments for observing the knowledge and cognitive processes used in solving complex problems not commonly accessible in classroom environments (Baker et al., 2008; Baker and O’Neil, 2002; Quellmalz and
Pellegrino, 2009). For instance, research from the learning sciences finds that
educational outcomes improve when students learn through social interaction with peers and experts (Gee, 2008; Behrens et al., 2008; Bransford et al., 2000). Other research suggests that learning is enhanced when students employ domain-specific tools to solve socially significant problems (Hatano and Oura, 2003) and engage in extensive feedback and revision cycles that support systematic reflection and self-assessment/evaluation (Black and Wiliam, 2004; Quellmalz et al., 2012; Perkins and Salomon, 1989; 1994; Anderson et al., 1996; Bransford and Schwartz, 1999).
More specifically, the research on simulation-based games reveals how the development of expertise and transfer are “triggered” by the affordances of simulated activities. For example, thinking skills and meta-cognitive processing are facilitated by the opportunity to utilize a variety of strategies that the participant possesses.
Additionally, because simulation based games delineate degrees of understanding and cognitive demand required to solve the problems of interest in the simulation, they can simultaneously accommodate and reveal alternate/multiple solution strategies that are representative of different levels of expertise of the players (Vendlinksi, et al., 2008; Behrens et al., 2012).
Second, serious games collect nuanced and complex data about student activity in the environment that can be used in analyses of learning (Pellegrino and Quellmalz, 2010; Ketelhut et al., 2008; Dieterle, 2009; Shaffer and Gee, 2012; Behrens et al., 2012). Every action taken in the “problem space” of the game provides information about the nature of student interaction with tools, artifacts, resources, collaborators, etc. These extensive digital records (also referred to as log files, data streams, or click
streams) provide highly detailed data that can be used to examine the cognitive and performative aspects about whether and how students solve problems collaboratively, and the ways in which they learn how to do so (Vendlinski et al, 2008; Shaffer et al.,
2009; USDoEd, 2010; Behrens et al., 2012; Dieterle, 2009; Shaffer et al., 2009; Pellegrino and Quellmalz, 2010).
Finally, serious games enable researchers to examine interaction from the socio- cognitive perspective of knowledge (i.e., cognition is not something that happens “inside” a person) through observing the “coordinated interplay of actions within and among people in a socially-constructed space” (Shaffer, 2004, p. 5). That is, because they replicate complex environments or simulate real-world communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), games and simulations provide a situated context for applying findings from the learning sciences that suggest cognition is situated and distributed physically, socially, and symbolically in the ways people think, learn and work in the world (Barab et al., 2012; Gee, 2008; Brown et al., 1989; Dieterle, 2009).
This socio-cognitive stance, also referred to as “situated learning,” is rooted in a perspective that the knowledge people have and the ways in which they acquire and make meaning of it is socially negotiated, co-constructed, and context specific to particular communities of practice (Vygotsky, 1978; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Schon, 1983, 1987), as is found in the world of work where people often work to solve specific and task-oriented problems. This stance is a stark contrast to the more common conception of learning that is overly focused on the individual and his/her accumulation of facts and information. However, mounting evidence in the literature suggests that what we think of as “knowledge” is a function of meaning making through
social interaction, and that learning with others serves as the foundation upon which individual learning is built (Stahl, 2008).
Unfortunately, there is a persistent disconnect between the kinds of knowledge students learn in school and the kinds of situations in life and work wherein this
knowledge may be useful (Mislevy, 2010; Resnick, 1987). For instance, students are too often asked to “use the tools of a discipline” without an understanding of how
practitioners use them (Brown et al., 1989). In contrast, there are particular ways that professionals (e.g., scientists, historians, journalists, engineers, etc.) organize domain knowledge, and use tools and resources in the solving of problems. Said another way, there are particular ways that professionals organize knowledge, use tools, and leverage resources. These ways of thinking in, and characteristics of, a discipline are referred to as an epistemology, or an “epistemic frame” (Shaffer, 2004).