A survey of grade school educators on using games in the classroom was recently released by the Games and Learning Publishing Council (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). While this survey isn’t directly applicable to those of us working in higher education, the adoption and success of games methods in K-12 will impact responses to those approaches when we try them in our classes with those students years later.
A few findings that stand out:
- 55% of the surveyed teachers who include games in their classroom use these digital games with their students weekly. This suggests rising numbers of students who will be accustomed to the idea of games as yet another familiar method of the classroom, as at that level of use it’s no longer about providing novelty. (Of course, there are plenty of other teachers who don’t use them at all.)
- 45% of the surveyed teachers listed insufficient time as a barrier to bring games into the classroom while 44% cited cost. These are problems familiar to all of us in education, but it’s also interesting to see how other frequently cited barriers fall lower on the list, such as being unsure of how to integrate games into the classroom (only 23%) and a lack of administrative support (only 14%). In higher education, we face different challenges and opportunities, but there’s hope for wider adoption now that knowledge and availability barriers are diminishing.
- 47% of the surveyed teachers identified low-performing students as the ones who have demonstrated the most benefit from learning through digital games. While a survey like this is far from an objective way to measure the impact on such students, it is promising that a potentially harder-to-reach group of students is at the top of the list of potential beneficiaries of gaming. (Only 1% of the teachers suggested that none of their students benefit, but of course this sample comes from those teachers who have already decided to make use of games and are thus likely to see them as valuable.)
It’s worth noting that most of the focus of the survey seemed to be on using pre-packaged games in the classroom, rather than making games or experimenting with other methods of play, and the survey is highly biased towards the digital--which is of course not inherently any more valuable for learning than physical games. However, there’s hope that this trend will continue, and bring with it more students who are used to thinking of games both as sites for play and learning. It’s particularly interesting to put this adoption of games as educational methodology alongside larger debates about the common core and other requirements at work that, at least in US public schools, are likely to in part determine the preparedness of future classes of freshmen.
[CC BY 2.0 Photo by Flickr User Vonguard]
