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Games based assessment: Capturing evidence of learning in play
Why do students like video games? Well-designed games reward players for mastering required content and strategies. They facilitate players’ advancement toward more complex activities, engage players in organized social interaction toward shared goals, and allow players to monitor their progress. Could video games be used to assess student achievement?
UW–Madison education professor Richard Halverson believes that learning scientists and assessment designers can, and should, develop methods for using games to assess student progress. Current assessment methods in classrooms often lack the motivating and information-rich ways that games capture data about learning. Game play can provide a powerful new form of assessment.
Halverson and colleagues Elizabeth Owen, Nathan Wills, and Benjamin Shapiro build video games based on cutting-edge science research, then capture game-play data as evidence of player learning.
Their game-based assessment (GBA) project at the UW-Madison’s Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Research Center is funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Halverson and Kurt Squire.
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Engineering success
It’s not common to see a graduate student participating in a National Science Foundation review panel. Consider Golnaz Arastoopour an outlier.
Arastoopour, a third-year student of David Shaffer and a researcher for the Epistemic Games Group, was chosen to lead a group of researchers in reviewing submitted grant proposals.
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Assessment Design and Presidential Palaces in Kazakhstan
David Williamson Shaffer visited Kazakhstan in September to deliver the keynote address at the International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA) 2012 conference. His address focused on the future of testing and assessment based on games, rather than multiple-choice questions or essays, an idea that he said the crowd was “excited about overall.”
Shaffer directs the UW-Madison Epistemic Games project, which designs and builds epistemic games and innovative assessment tools. Epistemic games are designed to help players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need for a changing world.
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