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After much research, Mitch Weisburgh, Co-Founder and Director at Games 4 Ed, explains the science behind why gaming helps students learn.
Game based learning is where Vygotsky meets Dweck.
Lev Vygotsky coined the term zone of proximal development. This is the sweet spot for learning; it’s the area between what a person can do without help, and what they can only accomplish with help. These are the skills that a person can develop with guidance, persistence, and encouragement.
Carol Dweck is the Columbia and now Stanford professor who wrote Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dr. Dweck pioneered the growth mindset paradigm, where individuals view themselves as evolving, and therefore persist and iterate in order to increase their proficiencies and abilities.
Research suggests that video games offer a synthesis of both a growth mindset and zones of proximal development. There are over 180 million active gamers in the US and the average gamer spends 13 hours a week playing games. Given that 99% of boys, 94% of girls, and 62% of teachers play video games, isn’t it a relief knowing that they may actually be learning?
Games need to allow for graceful failure; game designers embed failure into the game mechanics without a lot high-stakes negative consequence to encourage balanced risk taking and exploration.
In Playful Learning: An Integrated Design Framework, Plass, Homer, and Kinzer point out that successful games tend to aim toward a player’s zone of proximal development, where a player can succeed, but only through effort and some struggle. Games therefore have to measure player skill, and then provide an appropriate response (feedback, consequences, next actions) based on that information.
Games need to allow for graceful failure; game designers embed failure into the game mechanics without a lot high-stakes negative consequence to encourage balanced risk taking and exploration.
Games are complex problems waiting to be solved in a way that is both fun and challenging. Kris Mueller, an eighth grade teacher writing for Edutopia, wrote: “A well-designed game leads players through carefully-leveled tasks that prepare them to succeed in bigger challenges.” What do we learn when we are put into situations that require us to solve problems while having fun and being challenged?
There are literally hundreds of research and pseudo-research papers on games. In Effects of Video-game play on information processing: a meta-analytic investigation, Powers, Brooks, Aldreich, Palladino, and Alfieri reviewed the findings of over 100 studies, and found consensus that games especially improved visual processing, visual-spatial manipulation of images, and auditory processing. They attributed much of the improvement to video games demanding that players interpret, mentally transform, manipulate, and relate dynamic changing images.
In an article to be published later in 2015, Digital Games as Educational Technology: Promise and Challenges in the Use of Games to Teach, Tobias, Fletcher, and Chen found that not only did people learn from video games, but that there was a significant ability to transfer that learning to other activities.
“A review of 95 studies found evidence of near and far transfer in applying learning from games to external tasks.”
Action games, often called First Person Shooter (FPS) games, improve perception, attention, mental rotation, task switching, speed of processing, sensitivity to inputs from the environment, resistance to distraction, and flexibility in allocating cognitive as well as perceptual resources.
A huge factor to learning through games is the time spent on task. Not surprisingly, the more time spent playing, the greater the gain in skills and knowledge.
Historically, time on task is “a potent variable in school learning”; it is highly related to proficiency and can be used to predict math proficiency to the nearest tenth of a grade placement.
Tobias et al report that those who learn using games, “tend to spend more time on them than do comparison groups.” While the learning is incontrovertible, no one knows whether game based learning is due to the increased time on task or increased efficiency in learning or both.
A huge factor to learning through games is the time spent on task. Not surprisingly, the more time spent playing, the greater the gain in skills and knowledge.
In the Handbook of Positive Psychology in Schools, Shernoff and Chikszentmihalyi note that enjoyment and interest during high school classes are significant predictors of student success in college, but that this is a rarity in US schools.
On average, high school students are less engaged while in classrooms than anywhere else. Students are found to be thinking about topics entirely unrelated to academics a full 40% of the time while in classrooms. Alternate approaches are needed in order to provide what is most lacking: greater enjoyment, motivation, and opportunities for action in the learning process.
High engagement is observed when students focus on mastering a task according to self-set standards or a self-imposed desire for improvement.
Engagement (enjoyment and interest) is represented by heightened concentration and effort in skill-building activities along with spontaneous enjoyment from intrinsic interest and continued motivation.
Shernoff and Chikszentmihalyi propose that an optimal learning environment:
1. Presents challenging and relevant activities that allow students to feel confident and in control
2. Promotes both concentration and enjoyment
3. Is intrinsically satisfying in the short term while building a foundation of skills and interests
4. Involves both intellect and feeling
5. Requires effort and yet feels like play
Their research shows that these can be present when students play video games. Students using a video game approach made considerably greater learning gains than those in a traditional classroom, and were linked to a higher level of engagement.
Students using a video game approach made considerably greater learning gains than those in a traditional classroom, and were linked to a higher level of engagement.
Shernoff goes on to provide an example: a full semester college course, Dynamic Systems and Control, was created around a video game in which students race a virtual car around a track for all of their lab exercises and homework. Not only did those students report a higher level of interest, engagement, and flow, but “The video game approach maintained the high level of rigor inherent to the challenging engineering course while adding the perception of feeling active, creative, and in control characteristic of flow activities. The students who interacted with the video game also demonstrated greater depth of knowledge and better performance in the course.”
SRI, in research on GlassLab STEM games for K12, found that, for the average students, learning achievement increases by 12 percent when game based learning augments traditional instruction, and if the “game” is a simulation, achievement increases by 25 percent.
Remember the earlier mentioned studies that showed that action video games improved visual-spacial skills? The Benefits of Playing Video Games(Granic, Lobel, and Egels in Americal Psychologist, January, 2014) noted: Spatial skills predict achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Spatial skills “can be trained with video games (primarily action games) in a relatively brief period” and that these skills “last over an extended period of time” and are transferable to other “spatial tasks outside the video game context.” Those learning these skills from video games show increased efficiency of neural processing.
Playing video games of any type has been linked to enhanced creativity, although we do not know if games contributed to the enhanced creativity, or if creative types tend toward video games, or both.
What are the downsides to game based learning?
According to Tobias et al, when the game mechanics become complex, learning can be inhibited. Game designers “need to be mindful of the cognitive load imposed on players” to learn to play.
There is little knowledge on the most effective ways to produce games “the reliably yield pre-specified instructional objectives.”
There is also little knowledge on the most effective ways to produce games that reliably yield pre-specified learning objectives. It’s hard to know in advance if students will master a specific standard through X hours playing any one game.
However, games that are intended to support learning (edugames) were especially effective when combined with other instructional methods, which argues for games being integrated with multiple methods of instruction. “Integrating games into the curriculum improves transfer from games to school learning tasks.”
Games, combined with other instructional strategies, may be the solution to Blum’s two-sigma problem.