Education Week - August 7, 2013 - 15

EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 7, 2013 www.edweek.org
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MULTIMEDIA: For videos of the games described in this story and audio
interviews with researchers behind them, visit www.edweek.org/go/games.
In his influential book How Chil-
challenges to Mr. Gee’s vision: creating
video games that children actually
want to play and capitalizing
on the avalanche of information the
games generate.
The center’s design studio in-
cludes more than a dozen programmers,
developers, and artists. Creative
director Brian Pelletier spent
18 years overseeing the artistic development
of popular commercial
games like X-Men Legends.
While not a multimillion-dollar
blockbuster, Crystals of Kaydor
took Mr. Pelletier’s team eight
months and $300,000 to create.
The same attention is being paid
to the game’s back end, where researchers
and programmers are
refining a new system for collecting
and analyzing “clickstream data.”
Completing Crystals requires
about 3,000 “events,” such as taps
on the screen, each of which repre-
sents a decision made by the player.
The game automatically logs records
of every event, along with
roughly 15 pieces of related information
it has been programmed to
collect.
Soon, the center will have a huge
database to mine for evidence that
particular patterns of play—how a
child solved a particular problem or
how long he or she spent trying—
are tied to learning outcomes.
Instead of taking isolated, decontextualized
snapshots of student
learning, said Mr. Gee, “we
can now use digital [games] to assess
people in multiple contexts,
measure their growth across time,
and track different trajectories to
mastery. It’s an incredibly threatening
moment for more traditional
forms of assessment.”
While playing Crystals, Ms. Thurow
initially struggled to identify
the emotions displayed on the faces
of the aliens she encountered.
Afterward, she said the game was
reminiscent of the “culture shock”
she experienced when her family
moved from Wyoming to the tightknit
Wisconsin community of New
Glarus shortly before she started
8th grade.
“Everyone was looking at me, and
I had to gauge if they really wanted
to get to know me or they were just
being nosy,” she explained.
Building Blocks
Mr. Davidson, the neuroscien-
tist, said developing the ability to
read others’ nonverbal cues is key
to navigating many social situations.
And the ability to focus your
mind—the skill at the heart of Tenacity—is
even more important,
he argued.
dren Succeed: Grit, Resilience, and
the Hidden Power of Character,
writer Paul Tough describes multiple
strands of research backing
those views, including findings by
Duke University researchers that
individuals who exhibited poor selfcontrol
as young children went on
to make significantly less money
than their peers, were far more
likely to suffer from poor physical
health and substance abuse, and
were far more likely to have been
convicted of a crime, regardless of
intelligence or social class.
Equally important, said Mr. Davidson,
are neuroscientific studies
showing that the parts of the brain
that regulate important noncognitive
skills can be altered through
training and experience—and possibly
through video games.
“We believe the way to strengthen
the circuits of attention and the circuits
of empathy is through practice,”
he said. “And the way you can
make practice fun is by embedding
it in a game.”
To test that theory, Mr. Davidson’s
team is using an MRI scanner to peer
inside the brains of children who
play Crystals and Tenacity. Mr. Davidson
said positive findings would
signify a “very hopeful” message.
“We’re not accustomed in this culture
to thinking about qualities like
attention or empathy as skills,” he
said. “But neuroscience is teaching
us that they’re no different than
learning to play a violin.”
For games like Crystals, though,
the road from cool prototype to
widely used tool will likely be long
and rocky.
States and school districts are
still struggling with the cost, technical
challenges, and politics of
implementing the computer-based,
exams linked to the Common Core
State Standards.
And Ms. Steinkuehler acknowledged
that the notion of testing
students’ empathy or self-control
could prove controversial.
“You have to figure out ways to
work on [those] skills without it becoming
this Orwellian task where
Big Brother is constantly watching
to make sure that you display the
right values,” she said.
Reality Check
Before game-based assessment
of noncognitive skills can move
into the mainstream, said Gregory
Cizek, a professor of educational
measurement and evaluation at
the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, there will be debate
about whether “it’s appropriate to
measure certain things in kids, who
should be doing the measuring, and
how those skills should count in determining
students’ success.”
There will also be psychometric
hurdles to clear, Mr. Cizek said.
“A kid might look at these stringy
alien things and demonstrate
empathy as defined in a gaming
situation,” he said, “but does that
translate to treating human beings
differently?”
Still, it’s not every day that
you see 14-year-olds enthusiastically
taking tests and bragging
about their sensitivity to others’
emotions, as Ms. Thurow and
her peers did during the recent
Games+Learning+Society play
squad.
“Games are a terrifically powerful
vehicle for altering the brain
in very specific ways,” Mr. Davidson
said. “If we can intervene with
children and actually strengthen
circuits that are beneficial for life
outcomes, I think we have a moral
obligation as a society to try.”
Coverage of entrepreneurship and
innovation in education and school
design is supported in part by a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation of New
York. Education Week retains sole
editorial control over the content of
this coverage.
services in rural health care.
The July 23 notice also asks
what steps the FCC should take to
measure overall program performance,
or that of individual school
applicants. Ideas include setting
target Internet speeds for schools
or within schools, or even, more
controversially, trying to gauge
whether access to E-rate money
improves academic outcomes.
Despite what had been championed
by the Obama administration,
the FCC does not recommend
specific dollar amounts and timelines
for boosting E-rate funding.
Instead, the commission asks for
comments on how much funding
is necessary and how strictly it
should be tied to certain types of
technology or applicants.
The notice asks, though, whether
the FCC should consider lifting the
overall program cap, even temporarily,
on E-rate funds, which
now stands at about $2.4 billion—
far short of the $4.9 billion that
schools and libraries requested in
fiscal 2013. It also asks how the
FCC could boost schools’ buying
power by encouraging more consortia
of schools to apply for aid.
The document raises the question
of how flexible or prescriptive
the agency should be when it
agrees to finance school projects
aimed at increasing broadband access.
Some technology advocates,
for instance, say fiber-optic cable
is the best option for boosting the
speed of schools’ Web connectivity,
while also giving them the greatest
ability to handle increases in
demand. Others say less ambitious,
lower-priced upgrades are
more realistic options for schools.
The notice “indicates to me that
they’re serious about a sweeping
modernization of the program,
and not just an incremental approach,”
said Evan Marwell, the
CEO of Education Superhighway, a
San Francisco-based organization
that promotes improved Web access
for schools. “There’s an openness
to outside-the-box ideas.”
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Family Partnerships & Engagements ?
Interactive Data Decision Systems ?
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Strategies ?
Common Core State Standards ?
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Contact Blair Roger @
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Photos by Narayan Mahon for Education Week
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