Game-based assessment

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about badges in learning as a result of my using Foursquare to chart some of the places I visit, and share what I do and don’t like about these places. I’m not as motivated by the badges on this particular platform as I’m really interested in the content. I can see, however, how using badges can help encourage users to check in more often and in that moment add more information to the service, increasing the service’s value to people like me. Win-win.

There are other apps that do this as well, while some apps (like SCVNGR) have challenges instead, but a similar idea of gamifying social interactions. In fact, universities are using apps like SCVNGR to add a gameplay element to their campus tours and orientation week walkabouts. In SCVNGR, users can do single challenges at one location, or as in the campus tour, they can be strung together in a “trek” that happens over a series of locations, possibly over an extended period of time (scvngr.com). The challenges also may be linked to real-world rewards like freebies or discounts.

Then there’s OpenStudy, which has gamified elements of academia, and users get badges for activities such as helping others with their homework (Young, 2012). Preetha Ram of Emory University started the company in an effort to give a better idea of what soft skills students are learning while studying. She says, “We all know that teaching someone is the best way to deepen your understanding of the concept” (as cited in Young, 2012). This begs the question, however, of how to document these achievements when they occur in the analog world.

The value of this gamification of learning seems to come in the incremental feedback and sense of achievement vs grading what hasn’t been mastered as in traditional grading (Gerstein, J., 2012). Khan Academy’s Sal Khan (2010) focuses in on this difference between positive and negative feedback in his editorial “YouTube U. Beats YouSnooze U.” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He says:

Perhaps the worst artifact of this system is that most students end up mastering nothing. What is the 5 percent that even the A student, with a 95 percent, doesn’t know? The question becomes scarier when considering the B or C student. How can they even hope to understand 100 percent of a more advanced class? Is there any point in studying differential equations if you don’t have an intuitive understanding of basic calculus? Is there any point to taking biochemistry when you have less than perfect understanding of first-year biology and chemistry? (¶ 5).

In a pointed summary of his argument, Khan states, “The current system does not allow for addressing [comprehension] gaps, so both professor and students settle for superficial coverage of the material. Students don’t retain anything because they didn’t intuitively understand it to begin with” (¶ 7).

Education and games might have more in common than at first sight. James Gee relays his experiences of trying to learn how to play a game from the manual, saying that he couldn’t understand the game from the rulebook. But, after playing (poorly) a couple of time, and then coming back to the manual after attempting the game he had a better idea of what the contents, in particular the new vocabulary, were referring to. He compares textbooks to the game manual:

Now if you’d played the game, what you’d do with the manual is use it as a reference to look up stuff that you need to know to get better or to understand something in the game that you don’t think you fully understand. And that’s the same way a textbook ought to be used. You ought to be using your chemistry textbook when you’ve already understood there’s something you need to know about chemistry, and you go use it, then, proactively. (3:19-3:39)

He argues that games and education are actually quite similar, and how they’re different:

All a video game is is problem solving. It’s just a series- and if you think about it, in some weird way, a video game is just an assessment. All you do is get assessed every moment as you try to solve a problem, and if you don’t solve it, the game says, “You fail; try again.” and then you solve it, and then you have a boss, which is a test, and you pass the test. I mean, games essentially are a form of assessment. The thing that is probably the most painful, ludicrous part of schooling, but in a game it’s fun, right, because it’s handled in a very different way. One thing games don’t really do is separate learning and assessment. They don’t say, “Learn some stuff, and then later we’ll take a test.” They’re giving you feedback all the time about the learning curve that you’re on. (1:14-1:53)

Application to the Classroom

Judy Willis (2011) recognizes that the differentiation required to create “individualized instruction, assignments, and feedback, that allow students to consistently work at their individualized achievable challenge levels, are time-consuming processes not possible for teachers to consistently provide all students” (¶ 16), but this does not mean that the idea cannot be applied to the classroom. Rather, she argues, “keep achievable challenge and incremental progress feedback in mind when planning units of instruction” (¶ 16). To do this she recommends shifting the responsibility for monitoring progress to students themselves via independent progress recording. Using charts or graphs, students can tangibly see their own incremental progress toward a larger goal. Individual consultation and goal-setting can set the parameters for these increments.

Badges could potentially be used here, where students have set targets on their way to the larger goal. At each target, students receive a badge demonstrating achievement and giving a waypoint, much as how in a game when a player loses a “life” they don’t start back at the beginning of a level, but at the checkpoint closest to the most recent failure. This also creates a reference point for future teachers/educators working with the student to understand exactly what they do and do not know and to what degree. In combination with Problem-based learning, this could allow for more confidence in the legitimacy of the certification/badge the student has received.

When determining how to set up these increments and levels of achievement, educators can learn from the gaming world. Ingrid Lunden at Techcrunch reports on how app-makers will fail without proper planning and understanding of game psychology; mere gamification is insufficient. It all comes down to meaningful motivations and objectives (Lunden, 2012). Lunden also warns that the gamification of apps is reaching its peak in the Gartner hype cycle and interest in the style may soon wane (Lunden).

To make it work, game designer Tadgh Kelly (2012) offers some insights on what works:

Validation: the feedback from others that what the user has done was valuable, which gets construed as personal value.
Completion: progress bars and a clear set of requirements for completion help users reach their goals and feel good about it. Legitimate goals only, though, not backdoor ways to get the user (or student) to do your work for you.
Prizes: Extrinsic reinforcement. Caution: removal of prizes can backfire, so be committed or stay away.

When looking at how this may work, in coordination with PBL there is space for success. Validation could come from students in the feedback and presentation stages, Completion is realized in finding the answer to the problem. Prizes do no seem to be necessary as the model for motivation in PBL is intrinsic. Stages in the PBL process could be marked by badges, or another appropriate, meaningful objectives and outcomes.

To do:

Look at one or two outcomes from my courses and identify how these could be put into a PBL lesson.

How can the outcomes be badge-ified?
What are the checkpoints at each stage?
Why should these stages and outcomes be meaningful for my students?
Run an experiment and see how it goes. Report back.

Ah, my own little project. Perfect.

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Kimberly Hogg

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Kimberly Hogg

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