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If it’s true that 97 percent of teens in the U.S. are playing digital games, then the focus on how games can fit into the shifting education system becomes that much more important. Schools, districts, and individual educators are trying to figure out how games and learning can fit into the current complicated landscape.

The newly released report Games for a Digital Age: K-12 Market Map and Investment Analysis, released by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the Games and Learning Publishing Council, describes the many different criteria in play in detail, including obstacles from the policy standpoint, lack of teacher development, as well as how the Bring Your Own Device movement is influencing the push towards games and learning.

“Games are more popular than ever with youth today with many students spending hours a day playing them,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. “What we don’t know yet is whether and how they can be a key ally in driving pathways to academic success.”

Though it’s well worth reading the report in its entirety, below are excerpts pulled from the report, conducted and written by Dr. John Richards, Leslie Stebbins and Dr. Kurt Moellering.

ON FINDING WAYS TO USE GAMES WITHIN CLASS TIMES

ON DEFINING GAMES: WHAT QUALIFIES AS EDUCATIONAL?

The language of gaming and learning games is still in flux, and there has been little agreement between experts in the field about what falls under the category of “learning game” and what is not a game, but has “game-like” elements. Not surprisingly, the literature of games contains no agreed upon definition of a learning game. When we asked our interviewees what they considered a game, we found no consensus. One extreme cited any “formative assessment based on an adaptive engine,” while the other cited products with aspects of game mechanics such as badges, rewards, and points. Although the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Codie awards category is for “Games and Simulations” (and researchers are sometimes careful to distinguish between simulations and games), for the purposes of this report we have included simulations in our broad definition of learning games.

JGCC

Such a wide range of products is confusing to the K-12 audience, because “games” can vary from products that are prototypical to ones that only leverage somewhat extraneous game mechanics to engage and to motivate. Confusion among types of games is of particular concern when examining the research evidence of the effectiveness of games in learning. Most university-based research evaluates learning games in environments that engage students for several weeks with immersive, challenging experiences. Thus, when researchers argue that learning games are efficacious, promote critical thinking, and engage 21st century skills, it is not necessarily clear that these conclusions apply to many shorter forms of learning games.

All games have game mechanics that are the central element of the game and, to some degree, are integrated with the learning content. As James Gee argues in his keynote at the 2012 Games for Change conference, the extent to which the mechanics of creating motivation and directing attention is intrinsic to the content of the game can greatly influence learning outcomes.

Gamification is the use of game-based elements or game mechanics to drive user engagement and actions in non-game contexts. In gamification, the game mechanics are divorced from the content being taught and are instead added in the form of some sort of reward element after completion of an activity. For example, a short-form math game that involves answering math questions where correct answers are followed by a badge or the reward of playing a “dunk the clown” game would be called gamification. David Dockterman, Ed.D., Chief Architect, Learning Sciences with Tom Snyder Productions/Scholastic is concerned about this use of game mechanics, stating “Gamification can begin to undermine a kid’s desire to learn” (CS4Ed interview, March, 2012).

ON SELLING GAMES TO SCHOOLS

The systemic barriers to entry include:

• the dominance of a few multi-billion dollar players;
• a long buying cycle, byzantine decision-making process, and narrow sales window;
• locally controlled decision making that creates a fragmented marketplace of individual districts, schools, and teachers;
• frequently changing federal and state government policies and cyclical district resource constraints that impact the availability of funding;
• the demand for curriculum and standards alignment and research-based proof of effectiveness; and
• the requirement for locally delivered professional development.

However, recent trends provide an increasingly positive arena for learning games and other digital products, including:

• the move to one-to-one computing in schools and the rise of a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) infrastructure for learning;
• the widespread acceptance and purchase of interactive white boards;
• the improvement of school IT infrastructure and access to the Internet;
• the 2010 National Education Technology Plan;
•  a strong focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills, and more broadly, on higher-order thinking skills;
• an increasing move in schools from print to digital materials and from a highly structured to a somewhat flexible textbook adoption process;
• the increasing interest in Personalized Learning Environments (PLEs) and adaptive engines; and
• an expanding base of research that shows the effectiveness of long-form games in learning.

 

The survey, which included 1,200 parents of children age 2 to 6, showed that, of those who owned iPads (462 in total), an overwhelming majority — 89.9 percent — said they read mostly print books and some e-books, compared to 7.5 percent who say they read print books and e-books equally with their children, and only 2.7 percent who read mostly or exclusively e-books.

But the report also draws an interesting conclusion about how print books or e-books (in this case, iPads with multimedia features) are alternately preferred in certain situations. During times when parents want to read with their kids (co-read, as the report calls it), print books are preferred, even when e-books are available. But parents prefer e-books when they’re traveling or commuting.

Mixed reactions were reported in other aspects too. Although parents recognize that e-books can play a role in developing their kids’ literacy skills, especially when kids are reading alone, many iPad owners — a full one-third surveyed — said that sometimes “it’s just too difficult to read with a child on digital devices, and nearly as many are worried the child would start to want to use the iPad all the time.” Overall, in fact, 60 percent of parents said they prefer their child to read traditional print books.

This report follows another, much smaller survey of 32 parents, which examined the difference between recall and comprehension when kids read e-books versus print books.

Of course, nuances in parents’ motivations should be further examined, the report’s authors write, with the following questions:

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Print or digital? Adults grapple with which is the best way to read — not only for themselves, but especially when it comes to their kids. Whether or not parents prefer print books over interactive e-books for their kids, the question is, what’s actually better for them?

Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. According to a study of a small group of parents released today by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, kids age 3 to 6 remembered more narrative details — “What happened in the story?” — from print books than from enhanced e-books with multimedia features.

But when kids were asked one plot question for each story, (i.e., “Why did x do y?”), there was no difference between the print book readers and the enhanced e-book readers.

“I would definitely make the distinction that the platform affected recall instead of comprehension,” said Cynthia Chiong, the lead author of the survey conducted at New York Hall of Science’s Preschool Place.

The study, the first of its kind to qualify the difference between basic and enhanced e-readers versus print books, examined 32 pairs of parents and their 3–6-year-old children as they read a print book and an e-book together. Half of the pairs read a basic e-book and the other half read an enhanced e-book.

Researchers found that while the multimedia features of enhanced e-books grabbed children’s attention, those same features also distracted young readers and led more to “non-content related interactions.” Features like animation, sound effects, videos, and games made it more difficult for some parents to keep kids focused on reading and diminished kids’ recall of the text. Parents continually had to tell kids not to turn the page or not to touch the tablets, according to Chiong.

The implication? Parents and teachers should choose basic e-books like the Kindle or Nook over enhanced e-books, such as the iPad, if they want a more literacy-focused co-reading experience with children. Prompting kids with questions that relate to the text, labeling and naming objects, and encouraging kids to talk about the book’s content from their own perspective all elicit kids to be more verbal, and can lead to improved vocabulary and language development, the study states.

But if “engagement” is the objective, the issue gets murkier. When it came time to measuring “child-book” engagement, based on the child’s direct attention and touch, more kids showed higher levels of engagement for the e-books than the print books, though a majority were equally engaged by both book types. Children also physically interacted with the enhanced e-book more than when reading either the print or basic e-book.

“Kids loved the enhanced e-books,” Chiong said. “It was great to see the level of engagement, how much they were enjoying it — and that’s one of our goals as parents, is engaging kids. If this can do that, especially in kids who might not otherwise be interested, it’s perfect.”

Chiong added that this study focused on younger kids — questions and priorities will be different for measuring the differences for older readers.

PARENTS’ EXPERIENCE

Parents’ comments showed a wide range of reactions. Some parents appreciated the iPad’s effect on their young readers.

“They’re able to hear the words…It came alive. I don’t have to do the reading,” said the mother of a three-year old. “Not only that, they pay more attention to the iPad. Sound effects were an excellent idea — they like the books with sound effects.”

Another parent appreciated the e-books’ prompts. “Actually.. [I liked the e-book] because I don’t know what questions to ask sometimes and the iPad showed what to repeat and say,” said a mother of a five-year old boy.

NEXT STEPS

For this “quick study,” which researchers recognize is limited by the small number of those surveyed, the intent is to help guide more comprehensive research in the future.

“This whole explosion of e-books has been great, and we love seeing what’s happening with the innovation, but now it’s time to start thinking more purposefully and thoughtfully into what goes into the creation of an e-book,” Chiong said.

Researchers advise that e-book designers be discriminating about the types of features they add to enhanced e-books, “especially when those features do not directly relate to the story,” the study states. Parents should also be able to have more control over settings to features so they can tailor the reading experience to their own needs.

Researchers believe a similar study should be done with a larger and more representative sample of participants and books, and should examine what types, combinations, and placement of e-book features help or hinder learning and conversation, and should explore how different populations (e.g., lower income families, non-native English speaking families) use them.

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No longer relegated to experimental programs, digital games are becoming much more commonly used in classrooms across the country, according to a survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released today.

Half of the 505 K-8 teachers surveyed said they use digital games with their students two or more days a week, and 18 percent use them daily.

There will be further, more in-depth coverage of this report in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, some more statistics from the study:

• Nearly 70 percent said that “lower-performing students engage more with subject content with use of digital games.”
• Three-fifths reported “increased attention to specific tasks and improved collaborations among all students.”
• Sixty percent said using digital games “helps personalize instruction and better assess student knowledge and learning.”
• Though most use Apple or PC computers, 25 percent said their students use iPads or tablet computers, and less than 10 percent use other mobile devices or video game consoles.
• 62% said games make it easier to level lessons and effectively teach the range of learners in their class.

Teachers mostly used literacy (50 percent) and math (35 percent) games in class, and said the games’ alignment with Common Core State Standards was the most valuable quality, the study showed.

Teachers said that the cost of digital games was the primary obstacle to integrating them into class. But only 17% of those surveyed said the school spent $100 or more on games, and 40 percent were not sure. Lack of access to technology resources and emphasis on preparing for standardized testing were also listed as obstacles.

The majority of teachers surveyed taught K-5, and 86 percent teach in public schools — 60 percent of which are Title I schools. What’s more, 80 percent of teachers surveyed have been teaching for at least five years, and 20 percent have been teaching for more than 25 years.

The online survey, conducted last month by VeraQuest, sampled 505 school teachers who taught kindergarten through eighth grade in the U.S., and was meant to investigate what teachers think about digital games and how games impact students beyond academic achievement. Teachers were randomly selected from a targeted panel of K-8 grade classrooms that are “generally proportional of the demographic strata of total U.S. teachers,” according to the news announcement.

The survey also included a series of videos featuring case studies that can be viewed here.

The Teacher Attitudes about Digital Games in the Classroom survey is part of research conducted by the Games and Learning Publishing Council, convened by the Cooney Center and E-Line Media, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The survey also received additional support from BrainPOP, which creates games for classrooms.

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The following are excerpts from from “Kids Closer Up: Playing, Learning, and Growing with Digital Media” by Lori Takeuchi, International Journal of Learning and Media, Spring 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2, Pages 37-59. To protect the children’s identities, all names are pseudonyms, and location details have been altered. Read the first post in the series: A Look Inside the Digital Lives of Tweens.

According to some scholars, digital media provide young people with the tools, spaces, and communities to develop the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and social practices needed for full participation in contemporary society as consumers, producers, and civic actors. Surely all children can learn something through their use of digital media. But some of these lessons hold greater value to their present and future lives than others.

Researcher Jackie Marsh argues that virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz can “offer young children a wide range of opportunities to decode, respond to and create multimodal texts in a playful space, significant activities in a new media age.” She postulates that reading Club Penguin’s newspaper, for example, can help foster children’s reading comprehension skills and that its chat feature provides a fun context for children to practice writing and use text to negotiate, collaborate, and evaluate. If and when more work, play, and learning activities are embedded in virtual worlds, as many predict they will be, current young members of Club Penguin and Webkinz will be prepared to navigate these spaces and communicate as members of online communities. However, whether they actually become better readers and writers—or just fall victim to the commercialized practices that operate across online and offline worlds has yet to be seen.5

From a developmental perspective, the fact that Katie is not a budding moviemaker is perhaps understandable, as is the fact that Victoria is not designing outfits on Photoshop and then uploading her creations to share with other young fashion designers online. They are just eight. Is it even realistic to expect girls of this age to participate in the artistic expression and civic engagement activities that proponents of digital media say these tools support? Do developmental reasons argue against postponing these expectations until adolescence, when the user interface of sophisticated programs like Photoshop and iMovie will make more sense, when parents are more willing to allow their children to participate in online communities, and when youth have developed better judgment about content, audience, and online safety? What about encouraging 8-year-olds to play outside with friends, siblings, and pets to develop physical coordination with real objects, rather than with virtual ones inside?

Creative expression and civic engagement using digital media may be eventual goals, but, as the two cases illustrate, technology holds a different set of opportunities for young children than it does for teenagers. In Katie’s and Victoria’s cases, I did not observe cell phones, video games, mobile devices, and online virtual worlds providing the vehicles and spaces for them to meaningfully communicate, coordinate, and negotiate with peers and relatives—at least not in the same ways these platforms are being appropriated by teenagers.

What I did witness, however, is how digital media are giving Katie and Victoria opportunities to develop identities as autonomous learners and technologically capable individuals and to try on various versions of their future selves, as fashion designers, aestheticians, and PDA-toting career women. I also got a glimpse of how Victoria uses digital tools at home to practice skills that may later serve her academically, such as reading onscreen instructions and newspapers, searching for information on the Internet, and word processing.

The two case studies illustrate that mere access to digital resources is not enough to guarantee that children will use those resources in productive and enriching ways. Parents and other family members largely shape the quality of the girls’ experiences, through deliberate acts of providing and regulating and through less conscious modeling of behaviors and attitudes that may stoke their daughters’ interests.

Read the full report, Families Matter: Designing Media for a Digital Age

But inequities exist. Katie, for example, is not receiving as much adult encouragement to visit Web sites with more onscreen text or to make use of productivity software as her best friend Victoria is. But do current disparities matter? When the girls reach age 16, will it have made any difference that when they were 8 Victoria dabbled in Microsoft Word and Windows Paint and Katie did not? Is there a reason to encourage children this young to engage with digital media in deeper ways than playing simple games alone? Or will other factors, such as school courses and adolescent sociality, level the playing field when youth reach the age at which technological fluency will have more immediate bearing on their academic success and future career choices?

What can we learn from the case studies of two little girls? Katie’s and Victoria’s family situations and cultural heritages are unique. However, most American children resemble Katie and Victoria in two regards. First, children are increasingly surrounded by, engaging with, and embracing media in both old and new forms. Katie and Victoria—like generations of little girls before them—still draw and play outside, do homework and chores, and spend time with family and friends, unmediated by screens of any sort. Rather than replacing or eliminating activities, digital media represent an additional layer of their everyday lives. Technology is part of the fabric of both homes, used by all family members for entertainment, information seeking, communication, and expression. In this way, the girls are not singled out as digital natives within a family of immigrants.

Second, any child’s particular relationship with these technologies is shaped by the people around them—parents, siblings, teachers, friends, neighbors, and so on. And these interactions are, in turn, influenced by individual maturity, family values, institutional policies, cultural norms, or a television network’s bottom line. The ecological perspectives offered by Katie’s and Victoria’s stories have made this latter point clear.

Because young children tend to engage with digital media at home, this research has focused primarily on what they are doing in this particular setting with family members. However, as Katie’s and Victoria’s stories suggest, by age 8, peers are also emerging as powerful influences—as is school, if not by providing Katie and Victoria with opportunities to learn with digital media, then through its institutional attitudes toward digital media. Other learning resources not explored in depth here—namely, books, after school and community settings, and online social networking and virtual worlds—are also important locales of interest development. Just as important is understanding how a child’s interests cross these boundaries and are strengthened and sustained over time.

According to Dr. Larry Rosen, the most recent technology trends (e.g., iPads, texting, Twitter, Facebook) are being widely adopted by consumers within a matter of years—if not months. In

comparison, the telephone, radio, and television each took decades. Because of this rapid penetration rate, children born just years apart demonstrate distinct patterns of media consumption, communication, and levels of multitasking.

Katie’s baby brother (born since my observational visits) will grow up mastering a different set of skills, habits, and dispositions around technology than his sister’s “mini-generation.” However, even as new technologies captivate young users in ever-faster cycles, the developmental capacities and predilections of children remain, for the most part, stable. By keeping their developmental characteristics in mind, adults—who are, by the logic of the mini-generation theory, the perpetual digital immigrants—should always feel empowered to know and do what is best for young children in a digital age.

Flickr: Andrew Shell

Kids learn with each other while playing games on the iPad.

Most of what we read about kids and screen time revolves around whether or not it’s good for them. But one aspect of media use with kids that’s worth examining closer is how co-viewing affects their experience. Whether kids are watching TV, creating digital media, reading, searching, or playing video games with parents, siblings or friends, consuming media becomes a different kind of experience than when it’s done alone.

Though TV is still the dominant media in most homes, other forms are quickly permeating daily life: video games, apps, and exploring the Internet are woven into most families’ activities. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center calls it joint media engagement (JME), and they’ve just released one of their comprehensive reports, The New CoViewing: Designing for Learning Through Joint Media Engagement, about the phenomenon and its effects. The theory goes that the better we understand how kids use media together, the better designed the media can be, to take the most advantage of how kids work, learn, think, and make things together.

HOW PARENTS RELATE

Perhaps the activity that parents love most to do with their kids — reading — has been vastly transformed by digital media. E-books can be read on Web sites, computer software, products like LeapFrog, and of course tablets and e-readers. And depending on whom you ask, e-books (or print books) are the medium of choice for reading together. The typically tech-cautious New York Times decided that “for their children, many e-book fans insist on paper.”

But the Cooney Center’s own “quick study,” which followed 24 families with kids three- to six-years old reading both print and e-books, showed that most kids preferred reading an e-book to a print book, according to Digital Book World. And maybe just as importantly, “comprehension between the two formats were the same,” though the enhanced e-readers with all the bells and whistles were distracting to young readers.

Still, “If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,” said the Cooney Center’s Carly Shuler.

Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.

And for a lot of parents, this kind of interaction is important. A recent national survey showed that two-thirds of nearly 1,000 parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they talked regularly with their kids about their Internet use, and almost half of them participated in their kids’ use of computers. And those who did, actively set both social rules — what’s appropriate and what’s not — and filtering software that block sites.

Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Lori Takeuchi, who wrote this report for the Cooney Center along with Reed Stevens, said what parents decide to do with their kids is largely based on their own childhood experiences. Those who grew up on the Internet or were young enough when they started using it in their daily lives have less fear about dangers.

“They’re comfortable with fewer rules,” Takeuchi said about the families she studied for the Families Matter Report she wrote earlier this year. Older parents, on the other hand, tend to use parental controls more. “Younger parents are willing to confront media and the unknown with their kids, whereas older parents aren’t.”

The rule of thumb also applies to video games. Parents who grew up playing games themselves tended to play more with their kids than restrict it, according to a 2007 study. And conversely, those who had negative opinions about gaming tended to restrict time spent playing with video games.

KIDS USING MEDIA TOGETHER

Parents aren’t the only big influences in a kid’s life when it comes to media. Children watching and playing together also affects the experience. For those families who can afford it, an iPod Touch is now as common place a toy as Monopoly used to be for the previous generation. Though some worry, and rightly so, about kids withdrawing from the social lives around them as they launch birds or slash fruit on their iPod Touches, observing two kids with their own device in the same room reveals something different — at least in my experience. Kids talk each other through their challenges, helping each other master levels, offering tips, cheering each other on. It’s a form of parallel play, in a way.

The same goes for video games. A report about parents’ interest in video games shows that kids end up learning a lot from each other and become empowered through sharing. “Collaborative interactions around video game play are good learning environments [in] that ‘in-room’ interaction provides opportunities for sociality, joint projects, and empowerment through sharing one’s knowledge and seeing it used for concrete success by others,” write the authors of the study.

And when it comes to TV, kids who watch together respond to prompts (from Elmo or Dora the Explorer, for example), than those watching alone. Kids also imitate each others’ responses and coordinate their actions to respond at the same time. They elaborate on each others’ responses and talk to each other about what’s going on.

Another great example of this was found with research from the Digital Youth Project, where authors of the Macarthur Foundation study found that kids hanging out with each other, watching movies or TV, playing videos together or listening to music, were more actively participating in what they were doing. They talked about what they were watching or playing, they worked together on modifying video games, and creating digital media.

CHALLENGES AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Ideally, of course, parents could participate in all their kids’ media use. But let’s face it, even if they had the time, for the most part, parents and kids don’t necessarily enjoy the same media. (Raise your hand if you’ve discreetly texted your friends or shopped on your mobile phone undercover while watching “Cars 2″ with your kids.)

Other challenges: Parents don’t always know what kids need to learn and how to help them find it. And if the TV or computer isn’t in a common room, parents don’t know what kids are up to.

Joan Ganz Cooney Center

The Cooney Center has an idea to solve this — at least in the home: Design a product that allows parents to monitor and participate what kids are doing from a remote location so they can still be part of the media experience.
“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a device that recorded what kids are watching on TV?” Takeuchi said. “There should be tools that help parents better know, so they can have conversations about what their kids have been up to.”

Parents can also use Web control tools not just to block what they think might be dangerous Web sites, but also to learn what their kids are doing online. “In a lot of cases, parents don’t know what their kids are doing, for better or for worse. These are kids who are doing things behind closed doors that are great,” Takeuchi said. “They’re learning how to program or build Web sites, and if parents have the control setting, they can find out what their kids are interested in, and can even help them.”

Parents can also acquiesce to letting their kids guide them through the activity they’re interested in. The learning relationship between parent and child that goes in both directions can be powerful for both.

There are lots of other great recommendations in “The New Co-Viewing Report”: Build tools and experiences that revolve around a child’s existing interests, not just prescribed topics; keep everyone engaged by offering content that suitably entertains and sufficiently challenges; provide guidance for the more capable partner in ways that don’t require a lot of prior prep or extra time, actions that can help ensure that the intended benefits of the resource are realized.

UPDATE: The Cooney Center is still in the process of collecting data for the e-book study mentioned in the article. Results reported thus far are preliminary.