January 10, 2013 marked the kick-off for Phase II of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Games and Learning Publishing Council. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Council aims to expand the role of games and gaming in the educational lives of children by providing new research and analysis of the field of games-based learning. In its first year, the Council has expanded research and set forth a rigorous agenda for future work.

Representing the diversity within the field, GLPC members include journalists, commercial and educational video game developers and publishers, classroom teachers, university scholars, and leaders in the venture capital, foundation, and investment communities. We launched this new phase of work with a renewed commitment to producing practical and useful products and research that demonstrate the possibilities of game-based learning to a variety of audiences.

In addition to the market map of the educational game sector for K-12 schools released today, we plan a series of analytic briefs on the crossover between commercial and educational digital game development, as well as another set of five video case studies illustrating innovative uses of digital games in the classroom. In order to reach classroom teachers who are seeking practical guidance around using digital games, we are collaborating with MIT’s Learning Games Network (headed by GLPC member Alex Chisholm) to bring together teachers for hands-on professional learning opportunities using their innovative Playful Learning platform.  We are also developing an expanded National Survey of Teachers and Digital Game Use to track changes since our last survey in May 2012.

Spanning the next two and a half years, our work to advance games-based learning will also include multiple policy briefs and conference proceedings, all of which will be published on a new dedicated website that will be launching this summer. The new information service aims to help developers create effective and entertaining games by helping them understand the latest research in childhood learning, game design and emerging platforms. The new site will also work to make developers aware of grants and business opportunities available in educational gaming.

The site also aims to help foundations, universities and venture capitalists make more effective investments in future projects by demonstrating what works and what doesn’t when it comes to both the development of educational games and the marketing of those games to schools, parents and others.

As we build up to our website launch, you can follow us on on Twitter @cooneycenter, where we will be tracking big developments in games-based learning!

Every parent and concerned citizen in the U.S. has been following the national conversation about the need for a balanced response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One area of concern that the President and Vice President highlighted in the action plan they presented last week is the role that media portrayals of violence may have on vulnerable children’s and their communities’ well-being. The President and Vice President have urged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the relationship between media portrayals of violence and possible effects on public health outcomes. Here is what their announcement last week included:

Conduct research on the causes and prevention of gun violence, including links between video games, media images, and violence: The President is issuing a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and scientific agencies to conduct research into the causes and prevention of gun violence. It is based on legal analysis that concludes such research is not prohibited by any appropriations language. The CDC will start immediately by assessing existing strategies for preventing gun violence and identifying the most pressing research questions, with the greatest potential public health impact. And the Administration is calling on Congress to provide $10 million for the CDC to conduct further research, including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.

While there is no demonstrated link between video game play and violence of the kind we have seen all too often in recent years, there is an active scientific debate over what we know and do not—and which next steps the scientific community should take to more definitively understand the many factors that are associated with highly damaging anti-social behavior. To help unpack the debate, we asked Cheryl Olson, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the subject and author of Grand Theft Childhood to write a post last week, and this week have asked Christopher J. Ferguson, Department Chair of Psychology and Communication and Professor at Texas A&M, and a foremost authority on video games and violence research to weigh in on the key issues. His valuable perspective follows.
—Michael H. Levine

Let’s start by acknowledging that the societal response linking video games to the Sandy Hook shooting was a clear example of what criminologists call “moral panic.”  Intense debates and condemnation by some politicians, pundits and even some scholars who should have known better began before anything official had been released about the shooter, Adam Lanza’s, media use history.  And sweeping statements were made about a supposedly consistent and alarming research field that simply doesn’t exist in the way described by some.  Fortunately, the Obama administration relegated media effects to a minor role in their proposals for gun violence (given the hysterical political atmosphere they probably had to say something about it).  The Obama administration has called for $10 million in funding for gun violence research which may or (depending on reports) may not include media effects research.  But assuming it does, and assuming it passes Congress, what should we be doing?

Photo from Flickr/Inspire Kelly

First, let me note the great risks that a research project launched in such a hyper-charged moral panic political environment already begins with the stigma of being launched for the wrong reasons.  That political environment could easily inject biases into the research process and that is something the CDC will have to be very alert for.  But assuming they get past that and are committed to an objective scientific process here’s what I think we should be doing:

1. We need to get away from the old-fashioned hypodermic needle models of media effects.  They have their choir of supporters but, by and large, the data are not encouraging for these theories.  Instead we should approach media use from more of a “uses and gratifications” approach, understanding that how people use media is more important than content.  Consider a religious book like the Bible.  Some people may use the Bible to calm themselves or seek inspiration.  Others may use the more violent passages to rile themselves up.  Understanding how people use media as active agents may, thus, be more critical than the content itself.
2. Related to the prior point, it is important to consider media that society values (such as religious texts) not only media that society is suspicious of.  Singling out a specific form of media may be distorting and biasing to our understanding of how media, all media have or do not have influence.
3. At present, although inconsistencies in the literature certainly exist, we can say that violent media have little appreciable effect on the general population of children.  However, it would be worth examining whether specific groups of children, such as those with elevated mental health symptoms, may experience differential effects (whether negative or positive).
4. Scholars and the academic community must cease approaching the issue of media effects with such a clear ideological bias as it often has.  In many articles this is easily identifiable from the tone of the literature review, or citation bias therein.  It is now well understood that social science is malleable, too malleable, and a systematic ideological bias among scholars is guaranteed to do great damage to the objective scientific process and the credibility of the field.

Debates about media violence, whether in the scholarly community or general public are not going away soon.  Most of us would agree that calls for more research are a positive thing.  However, we must also be alert for the possibility that ideological biases and societal moral panic may do much to damage the objectivity of the research process as so evidently happened following the 1999 Columbine Massacre.

Video Games Sales and Youth Violence Rates, 1996-2009. Click the image above to see a larger version.

Related: Download the  Presidential memorandum (PDF).

Christopher J. Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Central Florida and also trained at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He has been active in publishing research papers on violent and aggressive behavior in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books and has done clinical work with adults and juveniles in correctional settings. Currently he is an associate professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University. His research interests include violent criminal behavior, positive and negative influences of video games and other violent media and refinements in meta-analytic techniques. His website is www.christopherjferguson.com.

Every parent and concerned citizen in the U.S. has been following the national conversation about the need for an urgent and balanced response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  One area of concern that the President and Vice President highlighted in the action plan they presented on this week is the role that media portrayals of violence may have on vulnerable children’s well-being.  Our leaders will urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the relationship between media portrayals of violence and possible effects on public health outcomes.

While there is no demonstrated link between video game play and violence of the kind we have seen all too often in recent years, there is an active scientific debate over what we know and do not—and which next steps the scientific community should take to more definitively understand the dynamics of the many factors that are associated with highly damaging anti-social behavior. To help unpack the debate, I asked Cheryl Olson, Sci.D., one of the nation’s leading authorities on the subject and author of Grand Theft Childhood to weigh in on the key research issues. Her perspective follows. In the coming days I will be sharing other research perspectives on our blog and in the Huffington Post.
— Michael H. Levine

What we don’t know, and what we need to know, about effects of video game violence

At Vice President Biden’s meeting last week with game industry representatives and researchers, he made two things crystal clear. First, the evidence he’d seen did not show that violent video games cause violent acts. Second, many members of the public think they do, and the game industry had better address that belief.

The research so far

Photo by Joel Emberson

To date, video game researchers have generated more heat than light. As the Vice President said, and the Supreme Court agreed, no studies have found a causal link between violent video games and real-life violence. The plain truth is that most video game violence studies are not designed to provide guidance to policymakers, practitioners or parents; they are designed to place publications in academic journals and advance careers. And there are so many other problems with existing research. To name a few:

• Studies often measure aggressive behavior, but there is no widely agreed-upon definition of “aggression” or its relationship to physical violence.
• Many lab studies use a test of competitiveness, call it a measure of aggression, and equate tiny differences in this measure with readiness to physically harm others.
• Non-lab studies typically have small, non-representative samples.
• Developmental differences are usually ignored; results from college students are freely generalized to young teens. We don’t know whether there are critical periods with greater potential for harm (or benefit).
• Data cited are often a decade or more out of date, ignoring the rapid changes in the sophistication and availability of games. For example, in some modern games, the plot shifts based on moral choices players make.
• It’s assumed that games with violent content all have similar influences. Applying this line of reasoning to books, the Bible and a Twilight novel would have identical effects on readers.
• The context of play is usually ignored. Twenty minutes of assigned game play in a lab is assumed to represent children playing games they choose, in familiar environments, based on their current social or emotional needs—often for hours at a time and across many years. Group game play, which is typical for teens, is virtually unstudied.

When I began my research at Harvard in 2004, we had barely started to address the basics: who plays what games, how much and how often, with whom, and why. My research tried to answer these questions for 7th and 8th graders attending public schools, and how these factors might relate to common problem behaviors such as bullying and fighting. (Briefly, we found a correlation between violent games and some bad behaviors, but the link vanished when we factored in aggressive personality and stressful life events. Chris Ferguson at Texas A&M International University kindly continued these analyses after our grant funding ran out.) Since then, the MacArthur Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Pew Research Center and others have funded exciting work on children and video games—but avoid the political minefield of violent content.

The most pressing research priorities

We need to address the shortcomings noted above. But there are also subgroups of high-risk youth that deserve attention. If our main concern is that violent video games could encourage or trigger the damaging of people or property, we ought to study the media use of juvenile offenders—young people who have actually tried to damage people or property—to see whether and how their media diet differs. I worry about teens exposed to real-life violence, living in dangerous neighborhoods without access to a healthy variety of activities, who may overuse violent games to cope with boredom, stress and anger. (It’s possible that to a point, violent games might be a safety valve; excessive use might echo and magnify the violence around them.) Children with mental health problems and developmental delays are also unstudied. Media coverage has linked mental illness and school shootings, however unreasonably. Studying the media use of this subgroup might aid our understanding of (or rule out) risk factors for violent acts, and show anxious parents ways to minimize any harms.

Advice to policymakers and industry

Last year’s Supreme Court ruling ended a string of attempts to outlaw various types of game violence or require new labeling. This week, the President called on Congress to “fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds.” I hope to see studies designed to inform policy, that will look at potential benefits of games (yes, even violent ones) as well as potential harms. Ironically, the parents most concerned about video game effects are the ones least likely to be affected; their children have involved parents who monitor and regulate their media use. To win hearts and minds, and limit legal and PR kerfuffles, industry would do well to co-sponsor research for a wide-ranging parent education campaign. To start, what do parents currently know, feel and do about games, parental control options, and even healthy child development? A 10-year-old who can’t tear himself away from a game to come to supper is not “addicted”; he’s normal.

Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D., was principal investigator for a two-year, $1.5 million Harvard research project to study the effects of video games on young teens, funded by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. She coauthored a popular book based on that research, called Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. Her videos for parents on wise use of videogames can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/ckolsonscd

Photo courtesy of the NYC Department of Education

Welcome back! In our first post, we told you about Connected Foundations, a digital literacy program funded by the US Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and managed by the NYC Department of Education and the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.

In this post, we’ll describe the “badged and blended” formula we use in courses for NYC high school students. What does “badged and blended” mean? Instructional content in our online platform, BadgeStack, is grouped into badges that students earn as they demonstrate competencies, and our academic courses are designed for blended learning environments that incorporate both technology and face-to-face instruction and interaction.

What’s the big deal with badges?

To kids, badges are fun and different. More important to us, badges offer schools a way to pinpoint and make explicit the mastery of skills and knowledge. Badges can be both goalposts and trackers; the badges make clear what students will know and be able to do if they complete a given course, and badges show students (and their peers) what progress they have made and provide them with a sense of momentum as they move through a course.

We are not (yet) suggesting that schools replace grades with badges. Our students earn their badges but still receive grades as they always have. But it is not a great leap to consider how badges might serve as a more useful indicator of mastery than traditional grades ever could be.

Think of it this way: which gives you more information: a ‘B’ in Global Studies, or a set of badges that mark achievement with academic content and methodologies such as: World War I, World War 2, British Imperialism in India, Apartheid in South Africa, Reading Primary Sources, Analyzing Multiple Perspectives … you get the idea.

Badges for learning have gotten lots of attention over the past couple of years in the K-12 and higher education communities. Here’s a recent piece from MindShift that discusses badging. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education has jumped into the fray with an article entitled Grades Out, Badges In (subscription only) in which the author asks “What if we got rid of grades?” The piece calls out limitations and difficulties of traditional grading, and explores the possibilities of badging as a replacement system. Furthermore, the rise of MOOCs and other new opportunities for learning has created a strong need to recognize and accredit learning in a meaningful way.

Students as active learners

We use “badged and blended” courses as the coin of trade to spark student motivation—and sometimes teacher motivation—and to awaken students’ ideas about themselves as active learners. Our courses ask much more from students than passive note taking and test taking. Students in our courses earn badges for independent and collaborative research, for perfecting academic writing forms they will need for other classes, and for creating multimedia presentations to share their ideas. Along with content knowledge, students gain facility with digital literacy, goal setting, self-direction, web research, writing and revision, collaboration, and presentation—many of the skills most needed for success in higher education settings, and most desired by today’s employers.

Some students object when they first find themselves in the driver’s seat in a badged and blended academic course. “Why can’t the teacher just teach, and I’ll take notes?” We tell them: “This course does ask more from you. It also gives you much more education than you’ll typically receive in a traditional class.” Fortunately, many of our most vocal critics do come around, reporting at the end that it was a worthwhile endeavor. See this interview with Yali, a student who took one of our Regents prep English courses:

Rewarding academic and personal behaviors

As we discussed in our last post, students in our courses receive badges that recognize their mastery of specific competencies. Our badges fall into two categories: content-specific academic badges, and reward badges that map to a broad range of academic and personal behaviors that lead to better outcomes on the path to college and career readiness.

Each course contains several “levels,” equivalent to units of study. To make progress in a course, students need to “level up” by completing a series of content-related badges as well as by acquiring points tied to the reward badges. When students level up, their points return to zero, and they must identify a new set of behaviors to work toward (or continue working in areas in which they still need to improve) in each new level.

The courses share a common set of reward badges, so the behaviors can be reinforced across subject areas. Along with a badge series on exponential equations (Intro to Algebra) or Critical Lens Essay (Regents-prep English), students need to earn reward badges for general academic skills and behaviors that will serve them well in whatever educational or employment setting they enter in the future.

Students might choose to work toward badges that reward such valuable efforts as persisting through challenging material, gaining technology skills, attending to precision in their calculations, evaluating research sources, regulating their emotions when they are faced with a struggle, or collaborating effectively on a project. Teachers can also add their own reward badges, such as for an out-of-school volunteer project.

Winning hearts and mind(set)s

Through badging, we also hope to promote a “mastery orientation” (see Carol Dweck’s work on mindsets) in which incremental progress and the effort that goes into learning are more valued than grades or completing work as quickly as possible. We want to free students from the notion that schooling is all about either getting high scores or avoiding failure. By allowing students some degree of choice in what they do and decoupling their work from regimented, class-wide progress through courses, we try to give students a sense of agency and control over their own learning.

In their book Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success, Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard emphasize the power of helping students set long-term goals that are real and motivating. The challenge, then, is to break these large goals into meaningful sub-goals that give structure and purpose to what may otherwise feel like a grind. In short, we must help students to see how various short-term tasks and skill-building map to larger goals.

We realize that changing student mindsets is a lofty enterprise, but we believe strongly in the value of integrating these concepts with academic coursework and not leaving them to the domain of advisory or guidance. We hope this gets students thinking more explicitly and strategically about what it takes to succeed in anything, and also helps them start to gain a sense of their own strengths and weaknesses as thinkers, as project leaders and collaborators, as researchers, as presenters, as members of a community.

How badges play in classrooms

In our next post, we will visit and discuss classrooms that use our badges and blended courses—with an eye to showing the badging system in play, and fleshing out some of the fruitful variety we see in how teachers use our courses. Stay tuned!

Want to learn more about digital badges for learning?

• Check out this interview with badging guru Jonathan Finkelstein of LearningTimes, the creator of BadgeStack
• Explore Mozilla’s Open Badges Initiative
• Read a recent New York Times article called Show Me Your Badge: “Information-age credentials may be the first serious competitor to traditional degrees since college-going became the norm.”
• Read a recent Education Week piece called “Digital Badges” Would Represent Students’ Skill Acquisition: “Initiatives seek to give students permanent online records for developing specific skills”

As Instructional Designer for Connected Foundations from NYCDOE Office of Postsecondary Readiness, Joy Nolan works on course content, implementation, teacher supports, PD, & alignments. She’s a text complexity fanatic and a NYCDOE Senior Common Core Fellow, helping to align instructional materials to the Common Core Standards. Previously at Scholastic Education Group, she worked on Reading/ELA/Math programs focusing on Critical Thinking & College/Career Readiness for struggling students: Expert21, CCSS-aligned READ 180 NEXT GEN, MATH 180. She thinks badging is, will be, or should be the next gold rush of education.

Michael Preston is the Director of Blended Learning Strategy for the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Readiness, where he directs programs to support student development of digital literacy skills and teacher use of blended learning and mastery-based approaches. Previously, he worked at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning and taught at Teachers College, where he received a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology.

As part of our ongoing efforts to understand the ways that teachers approach digital games in the classroom, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is preparing a second national survey that we will be launching this year. We are even more excited about crowd sourcing some of the topics that will be included in this year’s survey.

If you are classroom teacher interested in learning what other teachers think about games and learning, please contribute your own topic ideas via this online form! It will only take a couple of minutes, and your feedback could make a difference in our survey.