Students in Dr. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s summer Games and Writing class crafted blog posts exploring play theory. Over the next several weeks, we will share their theory posts in this space to offer a variety of perspectives on play, games, and writing, written by current graduate students in the MA and M.Ed. English programs.
The Value of Studying Games for Graduate Students
By: Courtney Harting
In the world of graduate learning, the notion of play and games can feel almost
oxymoronic to the graduate learning experience. Why would students, in pursuit of refining their
selected areas of expertise through rigorous academic instruction and experience, opt to study the
role of games and play – activities designed to alleviate childhood boredom? The reality is that
studying games as a graduate student, particularly those of us in the field of secondary education,
has significant value in that it affirms the role of play in the classroom in a time when
standardization of curriculum, learning, and assessment are prevalent. In some ways, studying
games and the research behind it, gives freedom to educators to use play, guilt free, in the
classroom, in the best interest of their students – and the research is clear: games and play do
benefit our secondary students because it resists standardization; thus, they are worth learning
about.
The question then becomes why should we use games as a means to move away from
standardization, and what means do games provide for educators to do this? Games and play
move students from passive learners to imaginative learners, risk takers, and agents of their own
learning. In other words, it is through play that students can achieve what is possible as opposed
to succumbing to complacency, contentment, or simple actuality through standardized
approaches to instruction and assessment (Colby et al 47). Interestingly enough, in moving to
what is possible, students also move toward what is needed in regards to their own learning as
“interest-driven learning strategy in game worlds challenges the accepted standardized norms in
education hegemony, and we see recurring calls for more attention into the ways learners are
seeking knowledge to satisfy their needs, which are often not met in their classrooms” (Plass et
al 195).
In addition, in studying games as a vehicle for assessment, it is clear that games based
assessment, “provides ongoing assessment based on a continuous stream of data rather than
discrete data characterized by standardized tests. As a result, with GBA, educators can monitor
students’ learning progression over time” (Shute and Sun 492). In this way, educators not only
drastically increase the amount of instructional time by means of engagement but also by means
of assessing while gaming and while learning, as opposed to simply assessing at the end.
Likewise, studies have shown that assessment scores on various game based assessment
platforms correlate to standardized test scores (Shute and Sun 493-497). We can thus conclude,
then, that there is no learning to be lost – only joy and time to be gained by resisting
standardization of learning and opting for games and play instead.
In secondary classrooms, we often forsake games and learning for more standardized
instructional practice and assessment; yet, the value in studying games as a graduate learner
within an M.ED program is re-establishing what we already know to be true – standard practice
and assessment will yield standard results. Innovative game based learning and assessment, on
the other hand, is differentiation, is possibility, is engagement – and is that all important
buzzword within the realm of education – rigor.
Works Cited
Colby, Richard, et al. Ethics of Playing, Researching and Teaching Games in the Writing
Classroom. Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Plass, Jan L., et al. Handbook of Game-based Learning. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2020.