We’ve been Looking Where the Light
Is Good”: Using Epistemic Games to
Help Change the Education
Paradigm in the Digital Era
Re-published with permission from
Family Center on Technology and Disability
Technology Voices – April 2010
We’ve been Looking Where the Light Is Good”:
Using Epistemic Games to Help Change the
Education Paradigm in the Digital Era
An Interview with Epistemic Games Creator and Theorist David Williamson Shaffer,
Ph.D.
“Our argument,” he declares, “is that we should not be building
games for learning; we should be building games for assessment.”
Such an approach, he insists, “creates conditions under which the
system moves in an appropriate direction.”
Having said that, he emphasizes, “there is no blame involved in
the sense that the field of researchers and practitioners has had to
spend some time determining what good learning with technology looks like in order
to talk about what and how to assess. The time has come to make that shift. If we
don’t, I think the window of opportunity will have closed for us.”
So far, he declares, many educators who study technology – “and I include myself in
their number” – have focused their attention on answering the question, ‘How do we
as educators use new technology to create better learning environments?’
“We’ve been looking where the light is good. In taking that approach, however,
what we’ve neglected is the fact that we’re still assessing in the same way. Unless we
change our approach there is only so much progress we can make in creating good
learning environments because not only is there no way to measure what we most
care about, there is also no way to demonstrate progress on the dimensions of
learning that matter most.”
Core of the Research
The core of Dr. Shaffer’s ongoing research, he explains, is an examination of those
dimensions, i.e., the ways in which individuals in a global economy and an
interconnected world devise innovative solutions to complex problems.
“What young people need in order to succeed is the ability to
think in new and creative ways about complex problems in an
epoch in which a standardized approach to skill acquisition and
problem-solving continues to remain dominant in the nation’s
schools. Fortunately, there are many examples of nonstandardized problem-solving all around us among professionals. Young people
ought to be exposed to these examples. Epistemic games can help provide that
exposure.”
Doctors, attorneys, architects, engineers and journalists, among other professionals
“operate in environments that are generically called professional practica,” Dr.
Shaffer says. “These individuals solve problems but then step back from their solutions
and reflect on their approach; they talk with peers and mentors about what worked,
what failed and why.” The objective of epistemic games, he emphasizes, is to
recreate that experience of innovative problem-solving and reflection.
To be successful, his epistemic approach requires two critical components: the
presence of individuals to serve as mentors – and assessment. “We’re working on
trying to build the sophistication into the computer game to provide the kind of
feedback that’s necessary. The system is effective when players have access to live
mentors, to real people who provide players with feedback. We’re collecting a large
database of that information so that we can include some of that feedback in the
computerized segment of the game, which makes it easier for parents and teachers
to supervise and assess.”
“Assessment: The Tail that Wags the Instruction Dog”
Dr. Shaffer wants to make it clear that standards and accountability are not his
enemy. “I have no problems with standards or with an accountability system or with
assessment. The issue is not that schools, teachers and kids are held accountable; the
issue is that the wrong kinds of tests are still being used to establish the context for a
conversation about standards and accountability. This is why we believe that the
work Jim Gee and I are doing with assessment via epistemic games is important.
“The reason that children are tested on basic facts and basic skills is because that’s
what we have done for the past 100 years and for now that’s all we know how to do
in a standardized way. However, with games we have an incredible opportunity,
because games are standardized experiences. Everybody who opens a box or who
connects to a game website gets the same game. By monitoring what kids do during
a game we can measure the extent to which they are engaged in real-world
problem-solving thinking, thereby obtaining an assessment that actually tracks what
we ought to be assessing: whether or not the players are able to engage in complex
problem-solving?”
Assessments, he continues, “are the tail that wags the instruction dog. If assessments
are about basic facts and basic skills, then the instruction will reflect that emphasis. If,
on the other hand, assessments are actually about complex problem-solving of the
kind people are engaged in the real world, then the instruction will reflect that
emphasis instead. Games should be constructed to be used as assessments. My
colleague Jim Gee and I just finished a paper that will be on our website in a few
days making exactly this point.”
Although much learning occurs during an epistemic game, he explains, the game
creators’ objective is to link the learning with an assessment system that informs the
creator/researcher about the players’ effectiveness in emulating the thinking of a
professional.
Says Dr. Shaffer: “We told the teachers, schools and districts we work with that at the
end of the first year of epistemic game-playing students would be judged on their
level of effectiveness in real-world problem-solving. We tested the students by giving
them a specific scenario of a game to play.”
This approach to assessment, he continues, “activates the same apparatus used to
drill kids on basic facts and basic skills except that when employed in an epistemic
games format it instead teaches students to think in sophisticated ways. We can
actually watch the development of a way of thought derived from journalism,
architecture or engineering, for example, as players participate in the game.”
If a full flight of games in which students emulate a range of professionals were to be
made available in school districts, he insists, “the school system would be re-oriented
in a way that would measure and account for components valued in a 21st century
society in the digital era.”
Looking Forward, Glancing Backward: Research Role Models
In his research on the relationship between games and education, Dr. Shaffer admits
to a paucity of role models. “There wasn’t much of a research base. Yet many of the
questions we address in our research have existed since the beginning of our current
education system.”
Like so many modern educators, he names John Dewey as a role model. “When he
was writing 100 years ago, Dewey tackled many of these same issues in education
that still vex us and posed solutions similar to those I and others have
recommended.”
Donald Schon, a former MIT professor, also wins Dr. Shaffer’s praise. “Schon began
studying professional practices and the training of professionals in the 1970s and
1980s. Jim Gee has been writing for several years about computers, computer games
and video games in education and has been a major contributor to the knowledge
base.”
What’s especially unique about this moment in time, Dr. Shaffer
says, “is that the work that has come before – there’s been a lot
of it and much of it has been very good – on problem-based
learning, on kids learning to think in sophisticated ways, on kids
engaged in extended projects – all of those efforts have suffered
from a technological limitation: there were good ideas but the technology to
implement them on any reasonable scale did not yet exist.”
He cites an early example that served as a template for the technology-challenged
efforts that would follow through the decades. “One hundred twenty years ago at
the Cook County (IL) Normal School, Dewey’s predecessor Francis Parker developed
a system of reading and writing instruction in which the older students – fifth graders –
created pieces of writing that the younger students – first and second graders –
would read as their primers. There were benefits for each group: the older kids were
involved in writing for a real audience; the younger kids were reading authentic text.
In order to make this system work a printing press was constructed in the basement of
the school so the writing of the older kids could be printed. When I was in high school
we actually had a printing press in the basement. I took printing as one of my art
classes. I spent a semester typesetting one haiku. The same thing happened 120
years ago: the technological overhead of translating what had been written by the
older kids and printing it for the younger students overwhelmed the project.”
Now, he continues, “the notion that a technological limitation would stop us from
having older students write authentic text for younger kids is almost laughable. Their
writing could be done and viewed on the web and nothing would have to be
printed.”
Similar technological limitations, he points out, have hamstrung other attempts by
educators to seek other methods of learning and assessment. “The power of
computers is that they let us create simulations. The power of a game is that it lets the
players live in a simulated world. Game designers can build worlds of adventure. We
can build worlds of violence – we probably do too much of that – but what we can
do with games is build worlds where players have an opportunity to engage with the
same kinds of problems and learn to think in the same kinds of ways as real-world
professionals. These initiatives that were once too dangerous, too expensive or too
difficult for middle school students to do are suddenly easy in the virtual world.”
Now, thanks to technology, “the ideas originated by John Dewey and readdressed
by Donald Schon and others become much more practical in our education system.
From here on our task as educators is to determine how best to persuade our schools
to take advantage of the power of technology to make these good ideas real.”
Epistemic Games and Students with Disabilities
Although epistemic games appear to favor academically advanced students, Dr.
Shaffer sees a clear benefit for students with disabilities as well.
“One of the advantages of epistemic games is that they are
deliberately designed to connect kids with experiences of the
kind that they might have in the real world. That’s especially useful
for children with disabilities because much of their developmental
challenge lies is figuring out what direction they want to go in
given their own personalities and limitations.
“These games give kids with disabilities and those who work with them –
occupational and speech/language and physical therapists and others -- an
opportunity to see the kinds of activities the children might like and be proficient at
as well as the activities they might not enjoy or that might have a higher degree of
difficulty for them due to their individual issues.”
Unfortunately, he cautions, “Jim and I have to do some work on our end to make
sure the platform for the games, and the games themselves, require less
infrastructure to operate. In the short run this means finding brokering organizations
that are willing to partner closely with us to provide bridging resources between
practitioners in the field and the work that we are doing.”
The best example of such a brokering organization, he says, is the Massachusetts
Audubon Society, his current main partner. The society, he explains, maintains several
nature sanctuaries in Massachusetts and operates after-school programs for kids at
the society’s nature sanctuaries and on-site in schools. .
The society collaborates with after-school centers to devise hybrid programs. “The
Audubon Society possesses much expertise at bringing appropriate educational
programming to these audiences, which permits us to take advantage of their
expertise in the best possible sense so that our technologies can become part of that
programming.”
In special education, he concedes “I don’t know yet what the comparable
organization would be but I believe that if we had an organization that had
connections similar to Audubon Society’s but instead in the special education world,
that that organization would be an effective partner for us.”
Differentiated Instruction and Games Research
With children in special education programs now being integrated into general
education classrooms, differentiated instruction has become a high profile issue not
only for teachers, children and parents but also for cutting-edge games researchers
like Dr. Shaffer and Dr. Gee.
“This is a challenge that we have been considering very closely, not specifically in
terms of kids with special needs but generically in terms of differentiation. If one thinks
about work in a professional context – which is what our games do – work is done
collaboratively. There’s an expectation that team members playing the game will
work together and that the team needs to move forward in a way that brings all
team members along.
“Using the cohort model, there are a couple of ways in which epistemic games are
potentially beneficial in differentiation. One is that it’s not difficult to provide
differential access to resources. When a student is struggling on a dimension there is
the opportunity to detect the struggle and then provide extra help in a specific
area.
“The other advantage to the cohort model is that it allows players to play to their
strength. If a student is working on a final proposal as part of a team, the student
may find that he/she is better at illustration, for example, than at writing the text but
the team members must still work together. In other words, the student is working in
an area where he/she is strong but is able to connect with the idea that the other
team members are working with. We’ve seen that happen often in these games.
“Differentiation is one of the most difficult challenges in the practice of education.
Anything that increases the range of differentiation across which a person or a
system must work makes it more challenging. In that sense, kids who are substantially
ahead of grade level are just as challenging from a differentiation standpoint as kids
with special needs who need accommodations. The onus isn’t on either group.
Differentiation, not the kids, is the challenge. It has rewards in the sense that we know
that there are many benefits to working with kids who are not exactly at pace.
“As game designers we face a challenge similar to that faced by any designer of
curriculum or good instruction in adapting to differentiation. There are advantages
and disadvantages to the particular approach we are taking, but the issue of
differentiation never goes away – nor does the opportunity.”
Technology Makes It Easier
As technology becomes more sophisticated, Dr. Shaffer emphasizes,
pioneering projects and concepts become easier to implement in
classrooms because schools are better equipped with appropriate
technology. “Not long ago there was a big push nationally to ‘wire’
every school,” he recalls. “Only later did we realize that the push was meaningless
because the technology had become wireless. Today we take for granted that
students have access to a fair number of web-connected computers at school
whereas 15 years ago those machines were not available in sufficient numbers at
many schools.”
The evolution of technology since then “of course makes our job as technologybased educators easier. For example, Jim and I now do all of our development for
the web, which means that no local installation is necessary. All that’s needed is a
machine that has reasonably open access to the Internet, which at some schools is
occasionally an issue. This also means that when we reach the day when schools
can reliably count on Internet access outside of school, students will be able to play
the games as homework.
“One of the big shifts we’ve made is to be as technologically open as possible in the
work that we do. The most significant restriction issue to be overcome in that regard
is systemic, not technological. By that I mean that there are all kinds of structures in
place within our schools and our after-school programs. There are expectations
about who is going to be where, when, and for how long and organized in what
ways. All of those represent tremendous constraints that can hamper the evolution of
change.”
In fact, he emphasizes, systemic constraint – not technological or student limitations - is the most significant issue confronting him and Dr. Gee when they collaborate with
schools or with after-school programs. He offers an example:
“We’re doing a pilot test now in an after-school program in Massachusetts. From our
past research we’ve learned that epistemic games do not work well in a drop-in
program. When there are six weeks of work – two hours each week – kids can’t just
show up only when they want because that’s not the way a real urban planner, for
example, operates. Therefore, we’re very explicit with the teachers and students with
whom we collaborate. They assure us they have ‘consistency.’ Three of the kids in our
urban planning pilot game changed their after-school schedules so they are out of
the pilot. Another student was able to be there for only part of the day but signed up
anyway. That’s OK. It’s not a criticism of the program, but it’s the sense that suddenly
there’s a disconnect between the way an institution operates and the way we have
to operate in order to use this specific technology effectively.”
“Thinking Is Conditioned by Technology”
Must technology accommodate the unchanging ways that
humans process information or are children now learning
differently due to the technology to which they are now
exposed? According to Dr. Shaffer, “there is no doubt that the
ways in which we think are conditioned in part by the
technologies we use.”
There is now much evidence of neuroplasticity, he says. “Our brains are continually
wiring and rewiring themselves in response to the type of stimuli they receive, for
example, the things we do, the things we think about, the problems we solve and
what we see. All of those factors alter the wiring of our neural network. Computers
provide exposure to experiences that are not possible without computer technology.
Constant connectivity is one example; the ability to engage in what-if scenarios, the
ability to edit text rapidly a la Microsoft Word, the ability to create numerical models
and test them. These are experiences that didn’t exist 40-50 years ago. Even if they
did exist they did not exist on the current scale.
“It’s clear that the tools that we possess provide different experiences. More
important, though, our possession and implementation of these tools has changed
our criteria for what is worth learning. There is less and less justification for spending
five years of kids’ mathematical lives learning to perform the same tasks a 99-cent
calculator can perform.”
He is not arguing, he says, “that kids don’t have to learn basic arithmetic. Of course
they do. But 50 years ago we spent a lot of time teaching long division. I suspect that
if a national poll were to be taken of the number of adults who in the last year had
carried out long division by hand the number would be startlingly small.
“Not only is technology providing new experiences, it is making some of the old
experiences that our schools are focused on obsolete. Consequently, the entire
landscape of learning has been changed dramatically by technology. Educators
must find ways to adapt and take advantage of that landscape. We persist in our
old ways at our grave peril.”
“There Has to Be a Star to Steer by”
“Our approach to research has been very deliberate: to try to create best-case
scenarios,” Dr. Shaffer notes. “As in any project of navigation, there has to be a star
to steer by. There has to be a sense of where one is trying to get to. Otherwise the
researcher has no good guidance about which direction to take at any given time.
By using these best-case scenarios, we‘ve been focusing on building a way of
understanding what we can do under good conditions.”
His next step, he says, “is to take what we’ve learned and put it in forms that may be
less ideal but that are more accessible on a broader scale, that don’t require the
same infrastructure that we currently use in order to test best cases. We’ve moved a
long way in that direction in terms of our web–based development. We’ve
introduced non-player, computer generated characters to our games. The
assessment system we’re working on is not only effective at discerning players’
progress but is also helping the computer system itself to steer players toward the
resources we need.”
He and Dr. Gee plan to continue to partner with the Massachusetts Audubon
Society, as well as with other organizations that work with schools, and with afterschool programs, to provide enrichment activities “and to put the materials we’re
developing into the hands of individuals who function as brokers between the work
we’re doing and parents, teachers and others in the community who want to be
able to use them.”
Ultimately, he acknowledges, “we’d like teachers to have the ability to go to the
website and say, ‘I’d like to play,’ connect to the website and sign on. We’re not at
that stage yet but, ultimately, that’s where we want to be.”