Anyone who's ever played a video game knows that video games are good at one thing. It's about keeping score. At any time, players can see what level they are on, how many points and kills they have earned, how many badges they have earned, and how far they have to go to win.
Oh, that's fun.
That sophistication, and that little bit of fun, may soon be reflected in school ratings.
Educators and developers are increasingly turning to the digital world of games and simulations to make testing more stealthy, playful, and useful. In the process, the new assessments could also allow schools to be more creative.
“The idea is, can we embed evaluation more?” YJ Kim, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The 74. “Could evaluation be more exciting? Could evaluation be more flexible?”
In November, NWEA, which publishes the widely used MAP Growth test, announced a 3D digital assessment on the popular gaming platform Roblox that tests how well middle school students are learning Newton's second law of motion. did.
The game, called Distance Dash, requires two students to work together to launch vehicles of different sizes and payloads. The goal is to reach the finish line with both in perfect sync.
Distance Dash meets students where they are
Students choose a skateboard, bicycle, shopping cart, or car, load each with different items, and work together to fine-tune the forces on them. The game always covertly measures some goal, such as whether the student understands the principles of acceleration and how to best apply force.
Tyler Matta, vice president of learning science engineering at NWEA, said the assessment grew out of the Next Generation Science Standards, which require students to analyze and interpret data and understand patterns. .
He said it was impossible for NWEA's test creators, who had never worked with game designers before, to help with the design. “We got to see what goes into building educational games, and it was all very new to us. We learned a lot.”
The organization is working with developer Filament Games, which has produced dozens of educational titles.
“It's really about the ability to fail,” says Kenny Green of Filament, the project's producer. The data generated (for example, how many attempts students made and what changes they made) is important to teachers.
A new exam is coming as the popular gaming platform Roblox expands further into schools. Last October, the company announced it would spend $15 million to expand the educational experience on its platform, two years after an initial $10 million investment.
Roblox director of education Rebecca Canter said physics lends itself well to collaborative simulations like this. She says Distance Her Dash “represents the kind of team-based problem solving that real scientists do when working on real physics problems.”
Another recent development: In 2022, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development assessed the creative thinking of 15-year-old students in more than 60 countries through the PISA Creative Thinking Assessment. This assessment features interactive items that students can draw and submit. digital tools.
Organizers said the test also includes open-ended tasks with “no single solution, but multiple correct answers.” Initial results are expected later this year.
The Lego Foundation's Bo Stern Thomsen said supporters hope to one day make the tests more personalized and in many ways indistinguishable from games. “What we want is for playfulness to become an important part of the assessment,” he said.
Even better, he said, more playful tests could allow schools to offer more creative, inquiry-based learning.
He and others who support the new test don't mince words. They envision a world where the high-stakes multiple-choice tests we all grew up with are being replaced by high-stakes multiple-choice tests where, for the first time, teachers can earn recognition. I'm imagining it. It improves a wide range of “non-cognitive qualities” such as teamwork and creativity, while maintaining students' focus on learning.
“Every time you try to pause the experience or stop the learning experience, you actually stop the engagement,” Thomsen says. The same goes for play: “As soon as you start measuring play, play stops.”
“It’s about you engaging with someone else.”
Igal Rosen, who led the creation of the PISA test, said that while tests are designed to help students demonstrate what they have learned, they can also be demotivating.
He recalled interviewing fourth-year students who took the NAEP science exam. According to the student, at least a third of his questions were “very boring” and not engaging.
“They're going to skip it,” Rosen said. “They just choose 'whatever.'”
Rosen, now chief academic officer at learning software company BrainPop, recalls that when his team tweaked the NAEP test with a “playful version” that encouraged student cooperation, scores rose 50%. did. “It's no longer a matter of you just answering this dry prompt,” he said. “It’s about you engaging with someone else.”
When most teachers think of playful assessment, they probably think of digital tools like the popular learning platform Kahoot. Kahoot allows teachers to create game show-like quizzes and surveys to engage students on their phones and other devices. Luisa Rosenheck, head of education at Kahoot, acknowledged that despite advances, testing is “still a developing and untapped field.”
Digital tools like Kahoot, which help teachers conduct informal assessments during class, are helpful because they “feel lower stakes” than traditional tests. “It's very quick and informative. It's very easy to get feedback,” she said. “However, the type and format of the questions are often still separate items.”
In that sense, they're not leveraging what good games can do: collect extensive data about student thinking and decision-making, a metric far more important than whether or not they got the right result. she stated. However, this comes at a cost, so many educational games simply evaluate how far the player has come and how many tasks or levels they have completed.
“Stealth evaluation”
Researchers have been exploring the idea of more playful assessment for decades. Nearly 20 years ago, researcher Val Shute began considering ways to seamlessly weave direct testing into the fabric of instruction.
Chute developed the idea for “stealth assessment,” a system that carefully tests student learning in an interactive, immersive environment such as a digital game.
In addition to providing a less obtrusive way to measure learning, stealth assessments can also be used to describe “flow,” a state of mind in which a person is so engrossed in a task that they forget they are working. It was intended to help.
For most students, any elation disappears when exam time approaches.
“Evaluation is essentially about power,” says Kim of the University of Wisconsin. “Evaluation is essentially about evidence and rules.”
In contrast, new types of assessment allow students to challenge and question the rules. One of her suggested scenarios asks students on the PISA creativity test to make a paper airplane and think of ideas to improve it.
In another example, students design a “bicycle of the future” and propose three unique improvements to a standard bicycle. Next, you will be asked to fine-tune the design of the anti-theft camera on your bike. Finally, as future bicycles will be automatically powered, we will need to propose “unique ways to reuse or reuse” the pedals.
“The idea must be original in the sense that it would not be thought of by many students,” the test states.
For the past few years, Kim has been collaborating with teachers, student educators, and game designers, originally from MIT, to develop playful assessments for the classroom. Shute, the Florida State coach, called it a “stealth assessment,” while Kim prefers the term “playful assessment.”
“It’s a mindset change.”
Kim has recently been testing out what she calls an “assessment party game.” It's a free printable card game for teachers that teaches the process of drawing conclusions from a body of evidence, which Kim describes as “charades meets telephone.”
In the game, players assume one of three roles: performer, observer, or interpreter. He can only see one of the other two players, and the gameplay proceeds as the player silently acts out what is written on the card in no more than three movements. Masu. The observer notes what he sees and decides how to communicate what he sees to the interpreter.
Like many in the field, Kim said a major obstacle to increasing playful testing is that so many school systems use assessments to evaluate teachers. Ta. “At the end of the day, we're stuck with the idea that an assessment is a score, a score on performance and proficiency.”
On the other hand, for most educators, play is “not productive,” she says. “So it's a mindset shift for teachers to switch to the idea that 'assessment is fun and it's also assessment.'
this story produced by 74 Reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
This article was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
