Summary+of+Research+Findings



//Monday Nov 2 & Nov 9 (Mike)//

The best of educational video games research is case studies and correlations. For example 98% of child psychiatrists report concerns about video games teaching violence. But even a casual reviewer can note that correlation is not causality. There appears to be evidence that violent kids play violent video games, such as the Columbine killers who enjoyed playing Doom! But there is no evidence that playing video games contributed to their meanness and aggression. So children with preexisting violent tendency may be attracted to violent videos producing the positive correlation, and nonviolent children may be at no risk at all from playing. Without any evidence of causality, such assertions, even by trained child psychiatrists, are at best speculative. Another example is that school achievement is negatively associated with hours of game play. But again, correlation is not causality and perhaps by doing poorly in school some students make more time for their game play than those engaged in active studying for high stakes tests.

With its pro-social content and nearly direct delivery of school curriculum, Quest Atlantis seems closest to providing some evidence for the effects of video games, by providing an opportunity for educational researchers to conduct intervention studies with random assignment to group and control conditions. Yet QA only approximates some of the potentially valuable affordances of a true commercially successful massively multiplayer video game.

Is current research providing answers to the wrong question? There may be an assumption that there is a unitary effect of "games" of any sort or variety on learners. But drawing from Situated Cognition, what if it is the case that impact of games on learning that we seek to understand, is instead a rich dynamic interaction of student intentions with the play and learning affordances of each specific game. If true, then there would be no single impact of games, but rather an impact of a particular game, on a particular student, under particular circumstances. Asking questions across games and across students, then, would address the wrong question, and actually mask our understanding of the learning potential of games.

What explanation can we build for why the literature on games and academic achievement is so thin?

//Monday, September 6, 2010 (Stephen)//


 * Initial research findings about gaming and learning:**


 * The vast majority of research articles call for more research (a large complaint being that there simply have not been enough studies about gaming and its impact on learning).
 * MFY: with so many citations, this may not exactly be accurate-- maybe there's not enough specific research on topics of interest to educators.
 * Games are useful for teaching students specific skills but less successful in teaching broad, macroscopic skills that transcend several different content areas (...on their own; guided lessons using games are effective so long as metacognitive discussions between students and their instructors regularly take place).
 * The skills students acquire from games closely match the overarching game objectives (meaning that games in which the objectives are predominantly violent are successful in teaching violence and aggressive behavior, while games in which the objectives are predominantly pro-social are successful in teaching leadership, team-work, and collaboration).
 * MMORPGs are an effective means of fostering team-building skills amongst players/students, particularly since they overcome challenges that would inhibit growth in a traditional classroom (such as disability, racism, geographic distance, and other cultural hurdles).
 * MFY:This claim is too strongly worded-- there's no conclusive proof. Instead something like "MMORPGs "may be" and effective..."
 * Students with addictive personalities suffer (academically) from game usage.
 * Uncontrolled/unbridled game usage has a measurably negative influence on student academic performance (SATs and GPAs).

//Tuesday, September 7, 2010 (Masha)//
 * There are so many articles that... we **really** need to define what __exactly__ we are looking for. **Really**.

//Mon Sept 13 (Mike)//
 * With a goal of summarizing the area of research on Games and Learning, instead of immediately narrowing a search to fit a quantitative meta analysis framework, I'd suggest we organanize all the relevant literature (quantitative, qualitative and commentary/theory) and try to characterize what we have found from our searches. Once it's characterized with meta-tag (my color coded things), then we could use that to inform our thinking about narrowing things down. Otherwise, if we simply take all the studies that use a particular word in their writing, (for example, learning vs education, video game vs MMORPG) there is a danger of eliminating substantial findings and skewing our results. Remember, these studies come from a wide range of journals and fields of research, so there's no guarentee that Communication Science always calls something an "online games" and Media Studies doesn't sometimes call it "video games."
 * As suggested on the main home page, I encourage the next step be to compile a single list of all citations found, in database format, so we could arrange them by journal, by search term, by meta tag, and in seeing that, decide how to narrow and proceed with our work.