Abstract
Fran C. Blumberg (Ed.),
Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education,
Oxford University Press: New York, 2014; 384 pp.: 9780199896646, £52.00 (hbk), £31.75 (Kindle)
Reviewed by : Simon Duff, Forensic & Family Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK
The chapters in this edited book are based on a three-day conference held in the US in 2010, and as such a review will be more coherent if it attempts to draw out the general themes rather than trying to focus on each of the 22 chapters, which are split into three sections considering:
Theoretical and cognitive perspectives for thinking about learning in computer games. The design of educational games. How to study learning and transfer from games to academic tasks.
Over the three days of the conference an eclectic group of practitioners and researchers met to consider the possibility that activity in computer-mediated environments could positively impact upon traditional education. Coming from a variety of backgrounds, the chapters represent the work and thoughts of psychologists, educators, game designers, and media specialists, each offering nuanced perspectives on this important question. Why is it important? Probably for two reasons:
We know from our own direct experience and observation that people are engaged with technology more and more, in recreational and work pursuits. Traditional computing and newer fields such as virtual reality have the promise of offering a wealth of possible experiences that are beyond the actually possible, including unique levels of interaction.
If our greater engagement with these new possibilities could help us learn skills, both practical and cognitive, to enhance our abilities, then these opportunities may be too good to miss by simply using interactive technology for entertainment alone (see Chapter 1). Interestingly, the origins of this kind of thinking developed in the 1960s (Chapter 10) and this book allows us, perhaps unintentionally, to examine the progress over 50 years.
Unfortunately, as many of the writers make clear, there are a number of factors that make the transfer of knowledge and skills complex. Firstly, transfer of learning is still a process that requires further scrutiny as the specific information transferred, the conditions under which it happens, and the temporal element of when the transfer is desired to happen, vary greatly. Indeed, research in non-computerized environments struggles to show a general level of transfer in many instances (Chapter 2), so this is not peculiar to computer gaming. However, there is evidence that if we can understand the details of transfer there is the possibility of, for example, gaming impacting on academic success. Interactive computer games that emphasize the use of working memory have been found to improve reading ability in 11 year olds (Chapter 4), and environments that encourage practice of movement may transfer to more complex tasks such as those required in laparoscopic surgery (Chapter 7). More encouragingly, there is no doubt that during game play individuals do learn and develop game-specific skills (Chapter 13) that impact positively on game play. The goal is to more consistently encourage useful transferable skills and knowledge to develop.
Perhaps central to this endeavor is good psychological theory of learning and the conditions of transfer. Chapter 9 presents the General Learning Model (see Chapter 11 for other models) and also presents Barnett and Ceci’s (2000) taxonomy for predicting transfer. It may well be that these are the scaffolding necessary to develop computer environments that can, in predictable ways, produce measurable and focused change.
Perhaps one of the problems, as various writers identify, is that the development of gaming has been predominantly atheoretical and even those games aimed at educating have tended to assume that designing for learning across environments is little more than common sense. As this book makes very clear, common sense will not provide the subtle detail that must be considered in the construction of tasks and interaction that are most likely to provoke learning and transfer (see Chapter 10 for a discussion of play and education). A second problem seems to be the assumption that gaming can and should directly lead to changes in academic performance. Just based on the changes in the environment between the two, from individual activity on a computer to either shared activity or individual activity in a shared space, might challenge this assumption, yet it does seem pervasive. Some writers have identified the importance of what they refer to as “bridge activities” (Chapter 17), where the activities within the game are brought back into the classroom to explicitly make the link between the two environments and the two tasks. It is thought that by making these links explicit it becomes more obvious to the learner what the knowledge and skills are that could and should be transferred and that this will ultimately aid the process.
One interesting approach to dealing with these issues is referred to as Formative Research (Chapter 12), which considers the conflict between atheoretical but engaging games and educationally sound but non-engaging games, and seeks to find the best combination of these two extremes by engaging with the “users” in order to get their understanding of, for example, the tasks involved in the game and how they explicitly link to the classroom. In the example that they present, the authors indicate that this approach has proved successful. This example focused on reading in young children, and the evidence throughout the various chapters is that if the task and the audience change then the success of the learning is likely to change. It may be another important consideration, that previously we have imagined that there is a single solution to successfully bring gaming and computing into education, whereas the evidence provided herein strongly suggests otherwise.
The book is unable to provide a strong sense of success in the use of gaming in education. However, what it does achieve is to clarify what the issues are, what happens if we acknowledge those issues, and how best to further our understanding and testing of transfer. In that respect it is a call to arms, but it is more than that. It also demonstrates the strength of a collaborative approach to a challenge and the progress that can be made when disparate professions share their expertise; something we could all learn from.