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Beyond “He Said, She Said”: Games For Learning Move Beyond The Traditional Dichotomy of Weak V Strong Instructional Guidance

In a recent article appearing in Educational Psychologist, Kirschner et al. (2006) argue that “based on our current knowledge of human cognitive architecture, minimally guided instruction is likely to be ineffective (p. 76).”

The authors present a convincing case that simply turning kids loose in an educational environment—no matter how cleverly designed—is a poor instructional strategy. They argue, rightly, that too many interventions naïvely assume that students will learn if they engage in “authentic” practices of experts in a domain—forgetting that what experts do and how experts learned to do what they do are not necessarily synonymous. So throwing students into a complex environment and asking them to figure out the underlying rules is, as Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, and Gee. argue (2005), a bad theory of learning because “learners are novices [and] leaving them to float in rich experiences with no support triggers the very real human penchant for finding creative but spurious patterns and generalizations (p. 108).”

The problem is that the authors present their case as a false dichotomy: minimally guided instruction versus what they call “strong instructional guidance.” But we are only going to speak to the current problems of education when we recognize that these are not our only choices.

We have to use new technologies to do more than just “more of the same”—more than traditional open-ended discovery learning environments and more than “the presentation and explanation of knowledge” that Kirschner et al present as its alternative.

As my colleagues and I have argued (Gee, 2003, 2005; Shaffer, 2005, 2007; Shaffer et al., 2005; Squire, 2004, 2005; Squire & Jenkins, 2004), computer and video games are one way to do just that. Why? Because any well-designed game has to do more than merely immerse a player in a virtual world. A good game has to teach players the rules of its virtual world—otherwise no one could play. And because no virtual world can accommodate every possibility, a good game has to lead players toward certain kinds of actions and away from others.

The kind of guidance that learners need varies depending on the domain in which they are learning (Shaffer, 2007). Different kinds of experts develop expertise through different kinds of guided experiences, and we can make educational games that recreate these experiences—and this guidance—for students. One way to do this is by developing what I have referred to elsewhere as epistemic games (Shaffer, 2005, 2007). In epistemic games players develop expertise not by playing as experts, but by playing as novices training to be experts of a particular kind: engineers, urban planners, journalists, and so on. Because direct mentoring by experts is part of any training for expertise, explicit guidance is part of any epistemic game. But it is the kind of guidance that real experts get in their practicum experiences, rather than the traditional direct instruction of school-based learning.

Key to this approach is the idea that a game is always more than a computer simulation (Shaffer, 2007). A game is all of the things we do with, in, and around a simulation: the roles we play when interacting with a simulation, the norms we follow, the rules we obey. The game provides the framework in which we make sense of what happens when we interact with the simulation. Educational games—not simulations for discovery learning but simulations that contain and are set within a framework of expert guidance—are powerful learning environments precisely because they move beyond the false dichotomy of “minimal” versus “strong” guidance, and recognize that students need to be a part of rich activities that build on their own goals, backgrounds, and interests, but they also need explicit guidance to find the underlying “rules of the game”: the knowledge, skills, values, and ways of thinking in a domain of expertise (Shaffer & Gee, 2005).

Kirschner et al provide an important cautionary tale that should be required reading for any designer of instructional technology. But their cautionary tale should itself be read with some caution. Because, as with any thesis and its antithesis, the most powerful results come not from choosing one or the other, but from finding a productive synthesis of the two.

References

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J. P. (2005). What will a state of the art video game look like? Innovate, 1(6), (available online at http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=80).

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.

Shaffer, D. W. (2005). Epistemic Games. Innovate, 1(6). Reprinted in Computer Education (in press).

Shaffer, D. W. (2007). How Computer Games Help Children Learn. New York: Palgrave.

Shaffer, D. W., & Gee, J. P. (2005). Before every child is left behind: How epistemic games can solve the coming crisis in education (WCER Working Paper No. 2005-7). Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

Shaffer, D. W., Squire, K. D., Halverson, R., & Gee, J. P. (2005). Video Games and the Future of Learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(2), 104-111.

Squire, K. D. (2004). Sid Meier’s Civilization III. Simulations and Gaming, 35(1).

Squire, K. D. (2005). Game-based learning: Present and future of state of the field. Retrieved May 31, 2005, from http://www.masie.com/xlearn/Game-Based_Learning.pdf

Squire, K. D., & Jenkins, H. (2004). Harnessing the Power of Games in Education. Insight, 3(1), 5-33.

David Williamson Shaffer

University of Wisconsin –Madison & Academic ADL

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