On a side note, I learned about freerice.com (thanks Megan Getz!) during the small group discussions yesterday. I love it. I wish I would have known about it to study vocabulary for the GRE. It's a website where, instead of clicking to give free food to the hungry or some other good cause (like similar websites do - animal rescue: http://tinyurl.com/2tsjrv - fund mammograms: http://tinyurl.com/37yr9l), it quizes you on vocabulary words and gives grains of rice as you get progressively harder words right. I like the idea that a semi-addicting (for English majors anyway) game has a kind of philanthropic component and you also bolster your vocabulary! On the other hand, the cynic in me found it ironic that I was sitting there in a warm classroom (mostly paying attention ;) with clothes on my back and food in my belly playing a game that increases my education in an institution of privilege while starving people somewhere were counting on me to know what hornswoggle means.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Video games and free rice
I'm on the fence about video games in the classroom, even though I was very enthusiastic about them in class yesterday. I got to thinking about the pros and cons of using them, when it occurred to me in considering the interaction between video gamer and video game that it eliminates the human element to assessment. This can be a good thing, since there is no judgment going on between the teacher and the student, so whatever biases the teacher has won't get in the way, but then I realized that if the video game has only a set answer for each question and you only advance if you get it right, you're not learning from your incorrect answers in the same way that we reflected upon, for example, in the Magdalene Lampert article we read for 402 this summer (yes, I actually remember this!). It was the one where the math teacher wrote all the incorrect answers on the board and discussed them with the class. We talked about this idea on Thursday night in 650, too, as we were discussing our first instructional videos about questioning. We're trying to hone the craft of questioning to maximize the learning potential for our students - so they learn not only what we want them to learn, and can demonstrate it, but also that they learn from their mistakes, and that making mistakes is an important part of the learning process. My feeling is that with video games, there is too much of a temptation to "beat" the game, which is good for testing your skills, but contrary to the kind of student-teacher relationship I think we should be trying to build. Perhaps video games can be a supplement to the educational experience, but I think they should not be used as a primary assessment tool.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like your thought here about the human element in assessment. Eventhough I just told you this in person, I will comment about it for the benefit of everyone else. A biology teacher in China told me that if a student asks a question about the material that is not in the material that will be covered on the test, she is not supposed to answer it. Instead she says "It is irrelevant." She did not like this--and she tacitly did admire those students who asked questions for their own intellectual curiosity rather than the test grade.
ReplyDeleteI bring this up because it seems the human element to assessment is also gone here, as all the material is taught for nation-wide tests and student responses are evaluated accordingly. This definitely scream of "set answers."
Enough of my own rambling: Now for my questions for you: Do you see NCLB's nationalization of certain standards as comparable to this? Do you think we are in danger, as future English teachers, of losing some of our freedom to assess? Do you think intellectual curiosity is in conflict with some of our goals to get every student to meet certain national (or state) criteria?
Ok I'm done. :)
I agree that video games could not be used as a primary means of assessment. Despite the video we watched, I find that even the most elaborate story games often teach the player to think inside, not outside, of the box. The goal becomes to get to the next level--and it's great there is a goal. I like that--but the problem is, people get focused solely on moving to the next level, rather than the learning experience along the way. As Sarah pointed out, we don't learn from our mistakes.
ReplyDeleteAs for NCLB--w'ere already feeling the hit in Detroit. Kaplan comes into junior classes for an entire marking period just to teach the test. One more year of failing, and we might not be there at all. My friend teachers in Compton in LA and he is supposed to do test prep for two months before the standardized tests (he doesn't).
I've always liked English, history and social science because they were a little fuzzier. There is not exactly a right answer all the time. It depends on how you examine it, and how you interpret. I enjoy that fuzziness and believe the students must take it to a higher level of thought to examine more than the factual. I would be horrified to lose it.