Games for Assessment & Learning
Motivate/Engage/Empower
Games in the Classroom
Application of Knowledge
"Digital learning environments can provide meaningful assessment environments by supplying students with scenarios that require the application of various competencies."
Competency-Based Assessments
"Without these situated and meaningful assessments, we cannot determine what students can actually do with the skills and knowledge obtained. Thus new, embedded, authentic types of assessment methods are needed to properly assess valued competencies."
21st Century Skills
Many games "typically require a player to apply various competencies (e.g., creativity, problem solving, persistence, and collaboration) to succeed in the game. The competencies required to succeed in many games also happen to be the same ones that companies are looking for in today’s highly competitive economy (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 1996)."
James Paul Gee on Grading with Games
Games as assessment tools?
Tina Barseghian of Mind/Shift:
"A number of individual studies have demonstrated that specific long-form games perform better when compared to typical lectures. Examples from research studies include Supercharged!, an electrostatics game that showed a 28% increase in learning (Squire, Barnett, Grant, & Higginbotham, 2004); Geography Explorer, a geology game that showed a 15 to 40% increase in learning (McClean, Saini-Eidukat, Schwert, Slator, & White, 2001); Virtual Cell, a cell biology game that showed a 30–63% increase in learning (McClean et al., 2001); and River City, a game that showed a 370% increase in learning for D students and 14% increase for B students (Ketelhut, 2007)."
Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at UVM
Resources for further exploration:
- Assessment in Game-Based Learning
- Edutopia Blogs on Games-Based Learning - "engaging kids and helping educators assess learning"
Email: tarrantinstitute@gmail.com
Website: http://www.uvm.edu/tiie/
Location: University of Vermont Mann Hall Room 202 208 Colchester Avenue Burlington, VT 05405
Phone: (802) 656-2641
Twitter: @innovativeEd