May 11 2013
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Content, Innovation, Policy

Transforming the Education Market: Look to Non-Profits

This piece was originally published on the Huffington Post on May 3.

The convergence in the last 20 years of advancements in computer, cognitive & neuro-sciences has made game-changing educational programs a possibility. In the area of mathematics education, inventors can now see a path to give teachers powerful yet easy to use, radically different digital tools to get all students to be proficient in math and even algebra. The breakthroughs go beyond math for math’s sake, beyond proficiency on tests, to the fundamental purpose of math education for all students: every person possessing the powerful thinking, analytic and problem-solving skills that mathematical literacy promises. To put a number it, a 2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study estimated that even modestly increased student math skills would add over $40 trillion to the U.S. economy over current students’ lifetimes.

But the K-12 education market is a poster child for unhealthy markets. Products are developed to politicized market specifications, which are far below their potential. Digital solutions from the past 30 years have not worked, so expectations are low. Curriculum is treated as a commodity, and not even evaluated. Not only do most educators not seriously expect teacher tools or content to make a game-changing difference, but K-12 purchasers are looking for approaches familiar to what they experienced in school. The market even lacks understanding of the indicators of program quality and effectiveness necessary to meet the market spec of standardized test success, so simple or secondary features hold sway instead.

In this market, I believe the leaders achieving radically higher educational goals are mission-driven, not-for-profit organizations. Non-profits, almost by definition, need support beyond current market forces. Visionary and savvy business social investments, though relatively small change to $1B businesses, can be and should be vital support for continuous invention and prove-out.

Many business leaders are looking to “help education” through their corporate social responsibility strategies. Unfortunately, based on my experience inside a non-profit education researcher and publisher, what most businesspeople will be looking for is just marginal improvement. There is an unconscious acceptance of the familiar, of “inch deep” learning rather than breakthrough deeper learning. There is a focus on increasing speed and reducing cost. There is a lack of appreciation for the vital role of the teacher.

So, for those visionary businesses and foundations interested in accelerating a quantum leap forward for all teachers and students in K-12 education outcomes (their future workforce/customers), I’d like to suggest that the following considerations are crucial:

1)  Look for non-profits pursuing radically different approaches. Digitizing existing content and approaches is just more of the same, even if ported onto a glossy-screened touch-tablet. People are actually inventing new learning tools, content and processes — like inventing powered flight. Real transformation is going to use teaching and learning models that seem and look and feel radically different from how you learned. Search for that.

2) Look for truly scalable approaches. These three questions will help you evaluate a program’s scalability:

i) Are they applicable to all teachers and students, from gifted to struggling to English learners?

ii) Are they aimed at the heart of the problem right now: at all schools and teachers and training processes as-is? Think Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and D.C. public schools?

Don’t just focus on and invest in the fringes of the school market, which will take years if ever to reach the majority of students in the community, and the nation. Each year, 4 million more children are passing through an untransformed pipeline.

iii) Can they scale up fast and without limit, driven ultimately by non-philanthropic funds? That is, do the economics of the solution enable eventual demand and resources from the main market, i.e. government public schools, to adopt, scale and sustain?

While some non-profits aimed at breakthrough transformation will be in the early stages of research and invention, you can also look for others with solid evidence that their program delivers results, and that there will be market demand and that it is economically scalable.

There are examples of businesses following all of these principles in their social investment in education. Corporate foundations, CEOs and chairs of Cisco, Broadcom, Emulex, Microsemi, PwC, Bank of America, Chevron and others  have come together to support a breakthrough math program using instructional software to tap students’ visual reasoning. You would not recognize math taught this way, it is that different.

The lowest performing elementary schools in Orange County were provided grants to launch this math program. Over 80% of those schools are now participating. A 45,000-student district serving predominantly economically disadvantaged English learners, Santa Ana Unified, went district-wide and closed its “achievement gap” with the California state average. And the targeted schools at a county-wide level are greatly outpacing similar schools in Academic Performance Index growth. The proven results have attracted district funding at over 1,000 additional sites. Over 500,000 students are being served, and scale-up is economical.

For any company interested in helping education, keep an eye out for the pioneering non-profits that fit this profile. Your social investment will then be poised to go beyond “help,” to transform and scale to millions.

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Apr 07 2013
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Content, Innovation

“There’s no achievement gap in videogames” – Quentin Lawson

I don’t want to learn how to play most videogames. By videogames I am thinking involved console games like Call of Duty, or MLB the Show. As a 50-something, that may not be surprising as I’m past the “shoot-em-up” or “race-car” ages (well maybe not real race cars). But truthfully, I would enjoy being able to give my my teenage sons a decent playing partner. The thing is, I know there would be a long and challenging learning curve. Because the learning is discovery/exploratory. And it’s not trivial or short, there is a lot to pick up. For me, it would be both mentally challenging and take significant amounts of time. And I already feel I have enough mental challenge-per-week to sink a battleship. I’m not looking for more. And I can’t afford to have significantly more time, or energy, sucked out of my days.

My point is: learning a console videogame like these is not easy, it takes focus, it takes effort, it takes mental agility, it takes perseverance, it takes time. Sorta like learning anything complex.

And here’s the point of this blog post: it would be ludicrous for anyone to propose that there’s an achievement gap for children to learn videogames. It would also be ludicrous to say that there is an engagement issue – at least for males with the games I mentioned. And it would be beyond incredible to say that kids have a lack of perseverance at solving the game’s problem scenarios.

I attribute this observation to Quentin Lawson, Executive Director of NABSE, the National Alliance of Black School Educators. I was demo’ing for him how all math concepts could be introduced a visual puzzles on a computer, which could be interacted with and animated to understand how to, for example, add fractions. He saw how this was like a videogame and, with young Black male students in mind, noted in an offhand way that “there’s no achievement gap in videogames,” so this could level the playing field. I have been quoting Quentin ever since.

Because how could anyone imagine that success for any child in learning any videogame could depend on:

  • their parents’ education level
  • their parents’ wealth
  • their neighborhood
  • the quality of their friends
  • how much their parents could “tutor” them on the game
  • their own success in school so far
  • the language they speak at home
  • or any other “subgroup” factor

It would be ludicrous; at the least I can’t imagine any such attributes being used by anyone as excuses why children couldn’t win at the game.

So, if productively engaging with challenging core content, like algebra, in a deep and mathematically rigorous way, that requires learner interaction and experiential learning, that starts easy and is gradually scaffolded, that develops problem-solving, perseverance, and confidence in ability to “win”, can be made into a videogame-like experience, then teachers can build-upon, cement and interconnect that mode of learning into deeper understanding and skills, without concern for any digital content achievement gap.

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Feb 03 2013
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Content, Innovation, Policy

Instructional Software: Just a Cleanup Activity after Ineffective Teaching??

How instructional software is positioned in the minds of many educators and others is outdated, and misleading.

The conventional model of instructional software (I am thinking “core” subject like mathematics) began, naturally, as a digital extension of conventional teaching. So: practice problems, read onscreen, with multiple choice answers, instant grading and perhaps with some gamification of scores. But if you didn’t “need” the “extra teaching,” you didn’t “need” the instructional software. So it was optional: for some students, some of the time.

There were two logical models for deciding for whom and when to use instructional software: use it for remedial students, or periodic diagnostic tests (eventually also online) for everyone, to determine which skills the student needed more practice in; then assign instructional software just for those specific skills. The metaphor is “filling the holes in the Swiss cheese.”

Implicit in those models was that some students did not need any instructional software: those who learned sufficiently from the standard, no-software-involved, teaching. The instructional software served a role of “cleaning-up” whatever gaps were left unfilled or incomplete after the normal teaching. By observation then,  the regular teaching on its own was ineffective in achieving the learning goal for some students some of the time. (The reason it was ineffective could include many things outside of the teacher’s control, of course.)

Despite the recent emergence of “blended learning” as a desirable future model of combining digital content with teacher & chalkboard learning, at present the preponderance of students still use zero instructional software in their studies. And frequently, even in 2013′s “state-of-the-art” blended learning examples, the role of the digital content is still essentially more practice, like a digitization of homework reps, albeit with intelligent sourcing of problems and with instant scoring.

Similarly, in many 2013 RFP’s the instructional software is specified for RTI tier 2 interventions for struggling students only. This means that not only do the RTI tier 1 “OK” students not need any digital component in the normal course of their learning, it’s not even seen as a way to prevent “OK” students from slipping into tier 2.

All of the above makes sense if you see the role of instructional software as just enabling “more.” More of what teachers ideally, technically “could,” but in the real world can’t, deliver because of the constraints of scarce time, and thus the impossibility of differentiating teaching to productively engage each learner and suit the pace of each learner. So the instructional software provides more time for those students and situations who just didn’t get enough time from conventional teaching.

But consider: more time for students has been tried, and tried, and doesn’t get game-changing results. By game-changing I mean ensuring that every student understands and gains content mastery and confidence in a subject – like math. If more of the same did work for challenging situations, then the mere, but very expensive, application of additional teacher time (double-block, repeated courses, pull-outs) would be shown to “fix” the problem. Which in math, certainly, it doesn’t — not at a scale and cost which can be universal and sustained (i.e. beyond a one-on-one tutorial). So instructional software’s role to give “more of the same” is not a fix.

This pigeon-holing of instructional software as for “clean up” is too limiting. If that’s your model, you wouldn’t even think of buying — or making — instructional software that has fundamental and vital value for every student. Fundamental and vital is how we view… textbooks. Lawsuits are filed and won to ensure that every student has a textbook. When the day comes that a lawsuit is filed, fought and won to ensure that every student has effective instructional software we will know that the pigeon-holing is over.

Here’s an analogy of this positioning problem to the world of exercise and health. It’s as if instructional software is seen as physical therapy, rather than as physical conditioning. It’s as if it’s just for those who are in some way injured, or chronically weak, rather than for everyone who wants to get in shape. You get diagnosed for your injury, perhaps a shoulder tweak, you do your therapy reps with rubber bands, and one happy day you’re healthy enough to quit doing the P.T., forever.

The future, additional role of instructional software is as a vital component of the learning environment, for every student and teacher. It’s like joining and then diligently using a gym’s facilities and moreover its trainers, motivation and social aspects. Properly designed and trained and supported, it’s a gym program that gets everyone more fit. No one gets to “test out”. No one gets to work “just on their weaknesses.”

And it’s not implicit that “ineffective teaching” is the raison d’etre for instructional software. This is turned completely inside-out: instructional software, in the hands of a teacher, makes teaching and learning more powerful and effective generally, throughout the school year: differentiating to reach every student (including the strongest), engaging and motivating each student at an appropriate level and pace, and providing multiple opportunities for the teacher to assess, diagnose, and consolidate student learning.

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Dec 01 2012
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Policy

Common Core Pessimists: Consider the Incremental Advance on Information Quality

In response to Rick Hess’ blog “The Common Core Kool-Aid” lamenting the latest silver-bullet ed-reform groupthink. I agree with Rick’s consistent themes that “it’s about the quality” and incremental improvement.

So, from the perspective of my experience in a non-profit math content publisher and ed researcher, a simpler take on CC: improves quality/quantity of widely relevant, widely comparable, statistically valid, actionable information for feedback into improving learning systems nationwide. State-level standards/assessments quality have empirically shown wide variation such that the low quality end has generated suspect information (e.g sky high state proficiency rates vs. NAEP rates). Apparently it’s politically more likely for the standards/assessment system to be gamed at the state, vs. federal, level.

So, not a panacea, nor a catalyst or driver for any specific “reform” agenda, just an incremental but i.m.o. highly significant and valuable improvement on the current state-of-affairs in information quality, transparency, and widespread relevance. Would be wonderful if over time CC turned out to provide a higher quality “floor” under teaching-to-the-test, too.

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Sep 15 2012
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Innovation, Policy

Assessments are the Ultimate Game-Changer

“Real change in teaching and learning requires real change in assessment” – Justin Reich.

This arcsparks post is 100% inspired by EdWeek’s Justin Reich’s excellent post “Everything Hinges on Assessment“, which powerfully backs up, and shows examples in support of, his quote above. My post below was also left as a comment on Justin’s blog.

In other words one might say, to profoundly change the game we need to change the scoring. Then, how people play the game to win has to change too.

And the only scoring on K-12 frequent enough, direct, clear, important to all the players, and timely enough to matter to anyone at all is tests, whether in-course or end-of-course.

I”ve been with a non-profit working for 11 years to provide a digital tool for a changed game that very few if any are seriously playing yet.

Specifically math instructional software for blended learning to ensure that students deeply understand math concepts. In the absence of hard-edged assessment, that tests the highest-order conceptual student outcome results we’re spec’ing into our instructional design, we rely on the soft evaluations made by educators on a personal level – i.e. on specific visionary educators, whether at district, site, or class level, seriously insisting on more than is tested for.

Assuming that our program and the educator are actually successful together, this is still an unstable situation, susceptible to specific educators leaving the district/school, etc. to be replaced by another with de facto lower goals for student learning. To put it another way, sustained learning above a floor-level set by the assessments is an unstable exercise in defying gravity.

At my shop, our experience is that a good program will show results on any level of quality assessment of the content, and we are perfectly happy to see results show up (and they do) on fill-in-the-bubble assessments. Nonetheless our strategy is to design for max conceptual understanding, regardless of the assessment.

Quality in instructional materials and programs is extremely expensive – much more expensive than the market thinks it is. Economics alone would dictate designing as cheaply as possible, to the lowest quality required to meet the assessment spec: designed for the test. Fortunately for my shop, we’re a non-profit so our bottom line is learning, not earning and we avoid this temptation.

Bottom line: couldn’t agree more with the points in this post; dramatically raising the assessment’s requirements on student learning will be a profound, irresistable, stable game-changer for educators, students, parents, and all publishers.

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Jun 28 2012
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Content, Innovation

Successful tool? 3 Signs of Impending Rapid Adoption

This post appeared originally on GettingSmart as a guest blog.

The future will bring amazingly better instructional content for teacher and student use. If the market notices key signs of this, then more effective, comprehensive content will be broadly and rapidly adopted, to the benefit of teaching and learning.  I believe there’s three signs the market should be looking for.

My optimism is based on a decade inside a digital content developer and publisher, focused on K-5 math, deployed in a blended in-school “rotation” model, and representing how math works with visual, dynamic interactive puzzles. You might think that developing early math content, like say place value, would be easy — but I can confirm that making high-quality, effective digital content for this “easy” subject is very, very hard. Most of what’s historically been out there just doesn’t cut it. But high-quality content is doable and more is coming.

So how can you tell what’s quality? Rather than trying to drill into intrinsic content and instructional design attributes, I’m going to pull way back and suggest an operational definition: What events in the market indicate high quality instructional content?

Here then are three signs to watch for:

1. Results show up on state standardized assessments. That is to say, teachers and students using the content in question outperform “business as usual.” Quality, effective content, with a feasible implementation process, that facilitates teachers to radically improve student learning will produce positive results, no matter what assessment is used. And the deeper the assessment, the better this signal is. I certainly hope the Common Core assessment consortia manage to go deeper as envisioned.

In other words, for high quality content there will be no need to shy away from state assessment yardsticks — to the contrary, success on those high stakes measures is a pre-requisite to broad, rapid scale-up in schools. Nothing that fails to move the needle on state assessments is going to cross the chasm into the main market. Note that to “take credit” for affecting end-of-course assessments, the content syllabus will have to cover a whole course or grade. Small stand-alone learning objects, like individual apps, can’t expect to move the needle on summative assessments.

2. Results show up repeatedly at scale starting in year one of implementation. Large-scale and district-wide deployments at 10 or more sites will in aggregate show significant and positive test results. This means that on average, results are being realized across varied groups of all teachers, and all their students. In other words, success stories will not be limited to single sites. Quality instructional tools will demonstrate relatively consistent results despite the wide real-world variability among teachers, students, and implementation. Results will be repeatable over multiple years, across student cohorts, and at a large number of sites.

3. Rapid scalability: The program design will enable straightforward implementation and earn an element of passionate teacher embrace. Both are vital to broad scale-up. In order to scale rapidly, use of the content will not require significant shake-up of existing school setups: it will work with the existing people, facilities, time and resources. The startup/sustaining cost all-in, including training time, will fit within instructional materials and professional development budgets and time. Put another way, to achieve broad reach and rapid scale-up, the program will show it can reach millions of students in just a few years, limited only by district decision-making.

So, please, let’s discount signs of “success” which are marketing hype, or this quarter’s popularity contest winners, until proven out. Let’s also not get confused crediting learning success mostly to platforms, or back-end features, or school structures. What is relevant to learning are of course the impactful moments of instructional interactions between student, content, and teacher – interactions that will become eminently more successful as better instructional content becomes available.

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Jun 05 2012
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Content, Innovation

What’s that in your Blender? 5 Key Factors of Digital Content

This is the first of I hope many guest blog posts for my friends at Getting Smart. About me: I’m observing the education market conversation from the perspective of a non-profit digital content publisher with a focus on math. I’ve had the luxury for the past 10 years of laser-focus on how to make what’s now known as “blended learning” work on just one subject area. While we’ve grown to serve over 450,000 students and 14,000 teachers, we’ve drilled down to a pretty deep perspective I would like to share.

What’s your main purpose for blended learning? Is it improving learning resources efficiency/cost and time/access? Or is it improving the learning itself? Much of the attention and excitement about blended learning is on the former, with time-and-motion descriptions of where the teacher, the student, and the computer exist during the day.

The addition of digital content to the mix of place and time is a rich area of innovation and practice. Recently the Innosight Institute’s Heather Staker and Michael B. Horn revised their pioneering taxonomy of blended learning, classifying blended learning implementations. The attributes include modality (digital or face-to-face), location (lab, class or home), time (fixed schedule/pace vs. fluid), and content (fixed or customized). The 11 derived types of blended learning are school-centric: labels are exemplified by specific school examples. Explanatory diagrams show physical layouts of computers, teachers and students. And from these diagrams the potential for raising efficiency in use of learning resources — clock time, student time, and teacher time — is readily apparent.

Yet as a digital content publisher, my organization is focused on the other potential for blended learning: dramatically improving the learning itself. I mean more comprehension and sense-making, better transfer of knowledge and higher retention of new information.

This requires us to add another perspective on what’s being blended, specifically on instructional interaction as described by Matthew M. Chingos and Russ Whitehurst in their recent report from the Brown Center on Education Policy. They succinctly remind us that where the rubber hits the road in learning is the student’s direct interaction with the teacher and/or instructional materials. The instructional materials used by the teacher greatly influence the teacher/student interaction. Here is where the digital ingredient in the blender can be a game-changer when it comes to the quality of learning. Curriculum is not a commodity; quality and efficacy of curriculum is highly variable. Chingos and Whitehurst dramatically point out the “scandalous lack of information” at all user-levels, as if the instructional materials used are irrelevant.

So, let me briefly introduce five key factors to consider for blended learning, from this learning-centric perspective of instructional interaction between teacher, student, and digital content.

Note that instructional interaction doesn’t “care” where or when it is. It’s about “what” it is. One modality is the student interacting directly with digital content (i.e. without the teacher). For web-delivered digital content, which I will assume, clock and location drop out of the picture – the interaction is the same whether the access is during or after school, in classroom or lab or home or library. Another modality is the student-to-teacher interaction, which could be either a conversation face-to-face during a scheduled time, or an ad hoc conversation over Skype. The point is the students and teachers are engaged in a conversation around learning, not the time or place.

Factor 1: By its 1:1 nature, student interaction with digital content is self-paced. Even essentially passive interactions like studying a digital textbook on a tablet or viewing a video on YouTube can be more valuable because they can be paused and reviewed by the student. Of course active interactions like games add an additional self-pace dimension of correctly solving a problem to proceed in the game.

Factor 2: Digital content can be much more than conventional-practice-on-a-computer of previously introduced procedures. It can be a way to introduce and explain concepts, whether in advance of, in parallel with, or even after they are introduced by a teacher. Yes, from my perspective of seeking better learning, there is always also a teacher ingredient in the mix. As Bob Wise, Alliance for Excellent Education President said at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum last November, to get better learning, “High Tech requires High Teach.”

Factor 3: Digital content can be highly interactive. Of course interactive means more than clicking a “next scene” arrow. Interaction means the student needs to respond to some problem-solving scenario, then see the results of her response. For example, that could be solving a math puzzle. Given appropriate strategy and quality of the digital content, this is a “minds-on” interaction about the academic subject matter, not just gameplay.

Factor 4: Digital content can provide immediate feedback. The quality of that feedback can vary widely. At the low end, but still a quantum improvement over text/paper/pencil, is the standard “red x” wrong or “green checkmark” right. At the high end, digital content can be used to provide immediate instructive feedback – an explicit explanation of why a solution was wrong, or why it was right. This instructive feedback facilitates a student’s learning (whether confirming a solution or showing what-to-correct) from each posed answer.

Factor 5: Digital content can provide an adaptive or custom sequence of learning objects for each individual. This can range from a beginning of year pre-assessment determining a grade-level syllabus, to real-time on-the-fly adjustment up or down of difficulty levels as needed, to longer term pattern recognition of student misconceptions, assigning specific corrective content.

Finally, consider this recently released IES report about math problem-solving. Aimed at curriculum developers as well as educators, its recommendations emphasize the teacher’s role in promoting deeper learning. I agree. A vital ingredient in the digital blender, to raise learning quality, is the teacher. The same content students are using 1:1 can inform and be used by the teacher, at the point of instructional interaction. The potential impact is enormous. As Chingos and Whitehurst say, “We can expect both theoretically and based on existing research that instructional materials either reduce the variability in performance across teachers, raise the overall performance level of the entire distribution of teachers, or both.”

Along with all the excitement and buzz around blended learning, to go beyond learning efficiencies, keep an eye out for game-changing aspects of digital content, for student and teacher use, to achieve deeper learning.

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May 06 2012
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Content, Innovation

Minds-on time in games: Look for Duty Cycle

This post is from a virtual roundtable on GETideas.org.

In a post above I wrote about “duty cycle” in games. Something important to note as one considers programs.    What I mean is: if you were to take a stopwatch and observe how much time students spend doing what in a game, what fraction of the seconds would they be “learning”, whether actively engaged or passively. And I mean learning the intended subject, not the gameplay per se.    Let’s suppose math. The “learning” could be understanding a problem and finding the math in it. It could be observing example math procedures of problem-solving. It could be practice in those procedures of math problem-solving; even quizzes are practice. It could be getting instructive mathematical feedback or reinforcement on math problem solutions, whether video, audio, or animated. It could be watching a new math concept explained, or the thinking process before posing a solution to a problem.    In a math game, then, duty cycle seconds would not include: non-mathematical gameplay time, non-mathematical problem setup (i.e. the backstory to a problem), seconds spent navigating, watching a non-mathematical “win” animation, or (gulp) waiting for the computer to respond.    While I am not saying that 100% duty cycle is an ideal design goal, I do say that duty cycles can vary quite a bit among games, and I believe that one should be conscious of duty cycle and consider what a low duty cycle vs. high duty cycle means for effective learning. High duty cycle games can be as engaging as low.

May 05 2012
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Content, Innovation, STEM

Game taxonomy? my corner of the map & the transformed learning moment

This post is from a virtual roundtable on GETideas.org.

The taxonomy of games and indeed the distinctions between games and puzzles are important distinctions for understanding research. We need to distinguish the mammals from the fish, even animals from plants, by their properties. I’ve tripped across little-to-nothing myself along the lines of a game taxonomy, and if readers can share schema they’ve found useful along with why that’d be much appreciated and interesting.

I have the luxury of focusing for the last decade on one corner of this map – in-school, supplemental, computer-based math games; blended online/student with bricks/teacher. Even in that corner, there is a wide range of niches for “game software” to fill: diagnostic/assessment. skills practice. personalized practice problems. “real world” problem contexts. with or without teacher role. concept introduction. remediation: adaptive concept/skill re-teaching.

I suggest that in the STEM arena, where understanding complex relationships of ideas, rather than fact memorization alone, are the learning goals, a focus on the following question is in order:    What exactly is happening at the moment (in the game) where the student is learning something new? In other words, aggressively strip away all the non-subject-matter gameplay and identify the learning environment that remains.

Finally I suggest that if the learning environment that remains is an electronic version of conventional instruction, then we are not looking at a game-changer. It can be highly valuable (save time, easier access, more duty cycle, quicker feedback, formative info for teachers) but not transformative. And transformative is possible with games/puzzles. In other words, if our shiny 21st century learning environment, even a highly engaging game, still rests on passive absorption of content (as if watching a lecture) then I say we should not expect transformative results for all students.

May 04 2012
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Content, Innovation

Google your way to Learning Complexity? I think not.

This post is from a virtual roundtable on GETideas.org.

Effective learning requires an interactive experience, beyond browsing, passive listening or reading, or viewing. Games are an interactive experience.

Let me begin to explain why I believe this distinction is valuable and important. The organization I’m in serves the math content area. And math, of all subjects, is the most tightly inter-connected, yes? Most of what you learn in 2nd grade you will use again in 3rd. If you really didn’t get fractions in elementary school, you will suffer (and fail) in algebra. There is a logical and connected sequence of learning concepts and skills: place value should come before the standard multiplication algorithm.

In order to understand math and be able to continue to higher math, one needs to be constantly adding on to a conceptual framework of math understanding – a framework ultimately built and maintained by the learner herself, in the learner’s head. So, with higher math concepts in mind, imagine trying to learn math from scratch by browsing for web pages through Google. Imagine just browsing for the “answers” to specific math problems. Maybe you could even post the problem and get it answered by an online expert. Maybe you find a little bit of math concept on this website, and a little bit more on that. For me, this math-by-browsing thought experiment has me generalizing that Googling, or browsing, through many un-related bits of information, in search of answers, is an inefficient and likely ineffective way to develop a logical conceptual framework, i.e. to learn anything complex.

Unlike Google search results, lecture series and books on the other hand can describe complex subjects; each does have a lot of content designed to fit together. They have to have an underlying conceptual framework, the lecturer’s or author’s, which they intend to walk the learner through. The problem is that, no matter what shiny new technology delivers lectures or pages, from podcasts to YouTube to Kindles to iPads, asynchronous lectures and books are of course essentially passive. And watching an embedded video is still passive. Even live lectures, in my unhappy experience at a large and well regarded research university with 100+ student lecture halls, are fundamentally passive for almost all of the students in attendance. The problem with passive consumption of information is that while one might feel able to follow the thread of thought at the time, it all too easily breaks free from memory later. It takes an additional, often optional step of action to weave it in, whether that be active listening via smart note-taking; homework; or pausing while reading a book to synthesize, take notes, or draw diagrams on one’s own.

So, rather than requiring extra motivation and effort, how could we get interactivity and action to be the path of least resistance for every learner to take? So that new concepts introduced get the benefit of active learning, and get riveted onto a conceptual framework?

Here’s on way. There are two ingredients: i) A game-based learning environment, or more specifically puzzles within games. Puzzles are by their nature interactive: situation, objective, player action, game response, objective achieved?, new situation. Over and over, in a highly motivating way. Perception/action/perception is how people are designed to learn. ii) immensely challenging instructional design to create puzzles, sequences of puzzles, and games that are effective for learning.

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