Pedagogy and Assessment

1. Pedagogy and Assessment

2. PedagogyandAssessment • Games teach multiple things in multiple ways, which complicates the process of incorporating games into the composition classroom

3. What to Teach • Ken McAllister identifies five lenses through which computer games can be studied: • As mass culture, where games are investigated for their power to override local and subcultural significations; • As mass media, where games can be seen as representing real-world information that recast computer games as sources for news and commentary on society and world events; • As psychological force, where the actual psychological effects of computer games are investigated and then placed in relation to their larger non-game concerns;

4. What to Teach / 2 • As economic force, where the business behind games and larger questions of ownership, hardware and software development, and other industrial practices are brought to the forefront of the investigation; • As instructional force, where games are investigated according to the ways in which computer games teach people ideas, concepts, behaviors, and so forth through the patterns, practices, and rubrics of play, educational computing, textual, social, historical, and cultural analysis, and so on.

5. What to Assess • Learner-centered pedagogical theories offer a manageable approach for incorporating computer games into the classroom.

6. Worksheet for designing a lesson plan using learner-centered principles (based on Elizabeth Harrison) • First, instructors need to identify overall goals or learning outcomes and classify them within three categories: • Knowledge (cognitive) goals (What do you want your students to know?), • skill (instrumental) goals (What do you want your students to do?), • and affective goals (What kind of people do you want your students to become?). • Second, instructors must determine learning objectives or performance measures that identify "what an instructor will look for in student behavior or work that demonstrates achievement of particular goals“. • Third, instructors need to design assessment activities that reflect learning objectives in order to ensure that students are learning what they are supposed to .

7. Questions for the teacher interested in game-based learning (GBL) pedagogies: • What am I thinking about doing or teaching? • How do education-oriented game customizations fit into my current pedagogy? What classroom practices do I value? What systems of thought inform these practices? • How can game customizations complement my other classroom practices? How do I imagine game-based teaching will change the way I conceive of education generally? What do I expect to gain? What am I willing to give up? • What new goals and objectives might emerge once game-based teaching has been fully integrated into my curriculum? What should students know by the end of my course? What are my first-order and subordinate goals?

8. Questions for the teacher interested in game-based learning (GBL) pedagogies: • How will I prepare students? What do students need to know before they start? What are the levels of literacy in my class? How will I use roles to accommodate students' abilities? • How will I pace my lesson plan? How much time do I have? What will I and my students do and when? What role will critical reflection play? How will I prepare for unforeseen challenges? • How will I assess this lesson plan? What aspects of the game-based learning experience will I assess? Will I tell students what the goals are and how I will assess them? What tools will I use for assessment? • How does this lesson fit into my teaching philosophy? Do I foresee this course as a capstone? Will my game-based pedagogy be integrated with other technologies or literacies?