Video_Games_as_a_Tool_to_Close_the_Achievement_Gap

Darren Batteast Dec 13, 2012 Prof Walker Video Games as a Tool to Close the Achievement Gap Video games have grown from a public amusement in arcades and bars taking their place alongside jukeboxes and pinball machines, to becoming the second largest industry in the world (76.1 Billion) second only to the music industry. Being one of the youngest and fastest growing industries in the world, video games have accomplished some amazing things, but their most amazing achievement comes from the effects researchers have observed from twenty plus years of exposure to them. This project will examine the way in which video games are traditionally viewed and used in our culture. It will show how with a bit of innovation and a change in perception, games can be more than a pastime, but an educational tool. It will include an analysis of video games from sociological, neurological, psychological, science, art & design, and business and economic perspective. It will not include video game mechanics or video game coding and design. The topic will focus on how games have grown in use, from a leisure pastime, and transcended to a dynamic tool for learning. I believe that through video games, important academic issues under the mantle “Achievement Gap” can be addressed and corrected. Video games found there genesis during the digital revolution, which originated with computer and software advocates in the 1960’s. These rudimentary prototypes found there preliminary home alongside jukeboxes and pinball machines. Once the owners of the establishments these games were tested in had difficulty accommodating the overwhelming demand, creators took note and the arcade era began. “The growth of shopping malls, which often used game arcades to attract younger customers, furthered the spread of popular early games”(Black., B. 2010) By the early 1970’s more and more teens were spending excessive hours in arcades around the nation. With backlash from parents increasing, video games had to undergo a transformation, if they were to survive. This evolution was governed by the Atari Corporation, and by 1975 they had released Pong; the first video game for a home console. Although extremely simple in comparison to games later released through Atari, it was responsible for the Corporations first one hundred fifty thousand units sold. (Black, B. 2010) Due to the advent of home computers in the early 1980’s, video games were becoming ordinary staples in American households. “The gaming industry experienced its first peak of consumer electronics; more than three hundred new games per year were being produced”. (Jenkins, H. 2010) This success was short lived due to poor quality control, and the gaming industry crashed in 1983. It wasn’t until the end of the 1980’s, that the gaming industry began to normalize. This reformation was dominated by Japanese-owned gaming companies. The “second” wave of innovation was not only responsible for the creation of games like “Mario” and “Lara Croft”, which would be at the center of The American Childhood experience; but marked the birth of the 3 Japanese giants. Nintendo, Sega and later Sony became the 3 most dominate companies to date. “According to industry estimates, ninety percent of American boys and forty percent of American girls have played computer or video games” (Jenkins, H. 2010) With this explosion in popularity, video games have created a debate among parents, researchers, educators, game producers and policymakers involving the potential negative and positive effects of video games on children. Arguments expressed in this debate habitually display the extreme; either praising or damning video games’ side effects. Neither side acknowledges the research findings supporting their opponents view; and through this negligence simultaneously arrive at the same false question. “Are video games good or bad'” As stated in Video games: Good, Bad or Other, “Games are multidimensional and have complex effects on players. Each dimension is likely to be associated with different effects.”(p648) Most of the research available agrees with what effects gaming can have one youth. “Action Games improve a range of visual spatial skills, Educational Games successfully teach specific knowledge and skills, Exergames can improve physical activity levels, Prosocial Games increase empathy and helping and may decrease aggression.” The list of adverse effects is just as extensive. Research reports that “Violent Games increase aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors; desensitize players to violence, decrease empathy and helping, Video Game play is negatively related to school performance, Video Games may exacerbate attention problems and Video Games can become addictive to some players.”(Prot.S, McDonald.K, Anderson.C & Gentile.D, 2012, p648) I believe if both sides would acknowledge the full landscape of research found over the past 10 years, they would discover that this simple dichotomy, “are video games good or bad” is as inaccurate as asking is “music” good or bad. If used in the in a negative context, both music and games can produce undesirable side effects to a youths development; academically and socially. However if video games are used as a tool to teach, not only do you eliminate the majority of the cons researchers have noted; you gain new positive attributes. While video game play is negatively related to school, it doesn’t have to be. If you use video game design as a tool to teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics, not only have you changed this correlation into a positive one, you’ve met the S.T.E.M.(fields of study in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) requirements that all schools nationwide are trying to currently achive. As for the attention, video games require the player to be hyper-attentive at times. If you can infuse a lesson into this crucial gaming time, attention becomes irrelevant and addiction transforms into a mental state the teacher welcomes for the student. James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Literacy tells us that there are 36 Learning Principals that video games yield, and that adhering to them could “transform the learning in schools, colleges and universities, both for teachers and faculty and, most importantly, for students.” (Gee, P. 2007) While all Gee’s learning principals are relevant, below are the ones that can only be derived uniquely from video games. * Active, Critical Learning Principal All aspects of the learning environment are set up to encourage active and critical (not passive) learning. * Design Principal Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience. * Semiotic Principle Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple signs systems as a complex system is core to the learning experience. * Identity Principal Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learning has real choices (in developing their virtual identity) and ample opportunity to mediate on the relationships between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity and a projective identity. * Amplification of Input Principal For a little input, learners get a lot of output. * Practice Principal Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task. * Achievement Principle For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner’s level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements. * Regime of Competence Principal The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not “Undoable” * Ongoing Learning Principal The distinction between the learner and the master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the “regime of competence” principal stated above, must, at higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, undoing automatization and new re-organized automatization. * Probing Principal Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; re-probing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis. * Multiple Routes Principal There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem-solving, while also exploring alternative styles. * Material Intelligence Principal Thinking, problem-solving and knowledge are “stored” in material objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve ye more powerful effects. * Incremental Principal Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guess the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalizations the learner has founded earlier. * Transfer Principal Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning. Our students current spend an average of 25hours per week receiving academic instruction in school. That’s half the time they spend on video games. We have to find a way to penetrate their leisure time, and transform it into addition learning space. It’s a proven fact that repetition effects how we retain information. According to Paul Gee’s “What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy”, video games implement 36 learning principals. The 6th is the “Practice Principal” which states, “Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring”. (Gee, P.2007) This “principal” is unique to video games. Games like Dante’s Inferno teach the player all 34 Canto’s within this 330+ page epic novel over a course of 10 hours. This virtual adaptation allows the player to experience this historical book in ways reading alone could never achieve, and through repetition, problem-solving and knowledge being “stored” in material objects and the environment, the participant has a visceral learning experience. The outcome is a player who wants to revisit the game, transferring prior gained knowledge they learned through the first play-through and discover alternative routes to master their skills once again. Anything a person spends 50+ hours on weakly is safe to call a passion or a mandate. (Kaiser Foundation 2010) Finding a way to pump dry and outdated curriculum into our students brains so they can test well, is no longer enough. According to Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, 3 attributing factors (Abundance, Automation and Asia) are effectively transforming the corporate market place. He states that “each year India’s colleges and universities produce about 350,000 engineering graduates,” and as a byproduct over half of the Fortune 500 companies now outsource software work to India. (Pink, D. 2006,p37) More and more of these once exclusive, sequential in thinking, highly specialized in technology, careers are being lost to people overseas just as qualified (if not more) for a fraction of the cost. It’s no longer enough to educate our students for “standardized, routine sequential work, found in careers such as financial analysis, radiology, computer programming, accounting and some law careers” that will be outsourced by the time they reach the marketplace. (Pink, D. 2006, p39) Our focus should be on teaching our students how to synthesize the big picture (semiotic principal), rather than analyzing a single component. As educators we have to find a way to increase learning time and reduce boredom, in a way that is attractive, compelling, entertaining and most importantly identifies and nourishes our student’s passions. Without finding a student’s niche, a decrease in attention and interest is inevitable. According to a Educator/Researcher named Barton of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), “based on his review of several hundred studies that examines factors contributing to the achievement gap, he identified 14 variables that consistently and substantively contribute to the achievement gap.”(Ford & Whiting. 2008, p952) These variables: Rigor of Curriculum, Teacher Quality and Preparation, Teacher Experience and Attendance, Class Size, Technology-Assisted Instruction, Parent Participation, School Safety, Student Mobility, Reading to Young Children, Parent Availability, TV Watching, Health and Nutrition, Birth Weight and Lead Poisoning, can be easily understood individually. However, in order to attain a complete understanding of the achievement gap, these variables must be interpreted holistically, and to do so Barton suggest that we must examine “two contexts”; school and before school and beyond. The “school” context, examines the 6 of the variables (Rigor of Curriculum, Teacher Quality and Preparation, Teacher Experience and Attendance, Class Size, Technology-Assisted Instruction and School Safety) stated above. Barton explains that, due to the fact that the average student is in school for 13 years, at 6 hours per day, for 180 days annually; the variables within the context of “School” have a cumulative effect. While I do agree that school is where a child spends the majority of their growing years, we know it’s not where they spend most of their time and I aim to prove that it’s not where the changing power is. The “before school and beyond” context examines the remaining 8 variables (Parent Participation, Student Mobility, Reading to Young Children, Parent Availability, TV Watching, Health and Nutrition, Birth Weight and Lead Poisoning) stated above. According to Barton, these variables occur outside the classroom and must be addressed in order to close the achievement gap. Just like their 6 counterparts stated above, these 8 variables focus on external factors that aren’t easily controlled. While I agree that all imperious negative affects to the achievement gap should be addressed, I don’t believe correcting these 14 variables is the solution. I believe there is a third context that he hasn’t discovered; in which the solution lies. I believe that while external factors can have a huge effect on the achievement gap, I aim to prove that internal variables like passion, hope, and self-efficacy will fortify a Child’s ability to handle anything thrown at them. Resources should be allocated to things we can actually control and correct. The theory is sound; the only thing lacking is the implementation. However, there is a video game designer by the name of Kate Salen who founded two organizations that special in executing the theory, that video games can be a tool for learning. Institute of Play and Quest to Learn both implement this learning strategy successfully. Institute of play is an organization that strives to use games as a non-traditional approach to academia, S.T.E.M. and the arts. The mission of this organization is to bridge the gap between the youth who were born into this high-tech savvy culture and those who have had to assimilate. They aim to accomplish this goal by providing instruction as to how students, educators and professionals can express their ideas through different multimedia channels and increasing digital proficiency across civil ranks. The first and only high school nationwide that uses video games and video game design as the central vehicle in teaching the core curriculum was found through the creation of this institute. Quest to Learn, is leading the way in new high-tech innovative education. They base their model on a collaborative “systems think” approach. Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. Systems’ thinking is an approach to problem solving, by viewing “problems” as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to a specific part or outcomes. Game play and design is the centralized organizing focus for executing this approach. (Corbett,S.2010) If educators and policymakers hope to close the ever growing achievement gap, they must first stop looking at the negative external variables and focus on the internal motivators of our student populous. We have to meet them on their own terms and guide them on a quest to find what they are passionate about. Aspirations of change can only be realized once this equally exhausting and exciting task is complete. Only then can a school boast, that’s its achieved what it was created to do; help students actualize their dreams and become productive citizens. From the research presented in this writing, I believe video games as a tool to teach, guide, learn and capitalize on student’s passions (Gaming), is the mechanism needed to reach our failing public education system’s scholastic dream.