Many children seem disinterested in the class room, but put them in front of the latest video game and they will soon have it mastered.
According to at least one researcher, the solution isn’t to banish the games, but to sneak learning
Many children seem disinterested in the class room, but put them in front of the latest video game and they will soon have it mastered.
According to at least one researcher, the solution isn’t to banish the games, but to sneak learning into them.
The approach, according to educational psychologist Dr. Valerie Shute of Florida State University, is to make the learning experience more enjoyable by creating video games with educational content and assessment tools integrated into them — and to incorporate such games into school curricula.
To kids, such games would remain a pleasant diversion. But to Mom and Dad, they would provide reassurance that their child is acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to excel in an increasingly competitive world.
“The concept is known as ‘stealth assessment,’” said Shute, a professor of instructional systems. “Essentially what we try to do is disguise educational content in such a way that kids aren’t even aware that they’re being assessed while they’re engrossed in game play.”
To accomplish that, Shute employs video games that have been specially designed to give educators a means of reviewing how students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual (computer-generated) worlds.
How students react to new challenges and put evidence together — without the pressure of having to remember a large body of information and then take a paper-and-pencil exam — can reveal a great deal about creative problem-solving skills and other important “21st-century competencies” that traditional testing cannot.
“Everybody likes to play,” Shute said. “And so much could be done to support learning using games.”
Stealth-assessment technologies also have several other advantages over more conventional teach