Play is central to cooperative behavior and communication, becoming strategic, and, for developing the capacity for later adult-unified behavior, to "develop the capacities to receive, integrate, remember and contextualize both internal and external signals" Sutton-Smith, (1996).
Play may be an organizing principal, and may create the foundation for later behaviors in school, work, and family life that will help with problem solving and developing academic and diverse literacies, problem solving, and comprehension.
I have been focused primarily on what happens when we give young people access to cutting edge technologies --like games and play situations, and then build towards purposeful work with opportunities to develop classroom goals that align with student formation of personal goals.
Well-designed curriculum is the key: created with the kind of challenge, useful feedback and interaction that games provide -- I propose that this will lead to more engagement, which should lead to more (quality) time on task--imperative in developing success and confidence and competency.
For this reason, play and gaming (structured forms of play), may be reasonable predictors for comprehension. The power of imaginative play, roles we experience, rules, tools, and the mental models we create to experience the world in the safety of play. Play may also expand comprehension in surprising ways; surprisingly, activities involving play are often seen as non-academic, and therefore non-educational, and not really learning.
You can take the play out of learning, but you cannot take the learning out of play.
Consider Learning by Design. Rather than diagnosing and finding deficits, why not design for the learning you want and then create a path to get their. I call this Learning by Design. An important element of Learning by Design is the role of play, a powerful form of learning, and harnessing play through games -- a structured form of play.
What makes this an effective instructional design strategy is that the work is all purposeful.
Four words tell it all:
Alignment of the Assignment
If there is a reading, it is because this article is what an engineer would read. If there is a tool, it is because they would use that in their work. Roles and identity are powerful and engaging, and when mixed with a design challenge, the learner gets to become an engineer for a day, and learns the tools, vocabulary, and strategies and habits of mind that professionals use. This includes the scientific thinking, reading for purpose, writing to document, and mathematics for description, modeling, and prediction.
My background training comes from cognitive psychology and curriculum and instruction, and this has led me to examine possibilities for exploring ways that reading comprehension and critical reasoning skills can be embedded within a digital curriculum of New Literacies.
The intention is to embed what are often considered rote style tasks into highly motivating activities. In a project using video games in the classroom, the games were used as a model for designing instruction and assessment, as well as using the technology to facilitate instruction and data collection.
I have worked in the past on a variety of topics related to reading and cognition. Specifically, issues related to prosody, formatting, and comprehension. This has led into investigations of readability, text complexity, and ways this can be measured.
Currently I am learning about the processes of comprehension as a foundation for many of the new literacies.
A key feature is the consideration of literacy as pattern recognition;
that all of us do this naturally;
that comprehension is not exclusive to text;
many of us can develop decoding skills to support our intention to gather information from texts;
that our beliefs about our learning are the best predictors of our future success;
that reading instruction can and should be embedded in activities that are interesting and relevant to learners;
and that new media like video games, media production, and interaction with technology can be used to develop comprehension.
Play, especially imaginative and fantasy play, are precursors to comprehension.
I have found that given purposeful activities most. if not all. young people can recruit the skills to become successful readers with the support of understanding the reading process, awareness of formatting, relating to the oral language experience, slowing down with confidence, and the ability to create situation models.
CHAPTERS
OBrien, D.G. & Dubbels, B. (in press) Promoting technological literacy. In Wood, K.E. & Blanton,W.E. (Eds.)Promoting Literacy with Adolescent Learners: Research-based Instruction. GuilfordPublications.
Dubbels, B. R. (accepted) Dance Dance Education: Identity informs motivation and engagement. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations.
Dubbels, B. R., O'Brien, D. G. (Submitted) Technologies, Tools, and Literacies: Emerging and Possible Practices, Student 2.0 and Beyond. The Journal of Information Systems Education. Journal of Information Systems Education. Special issue on Impacts of Web 2.0 and Virtual World Technologies on IS Education.
Dubbels, B.R. (2009) in Carlisle, R. P., General Editor Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society. "Models". Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009.
Dubbels, B.R. (2009) in Carlisle, R. P., General Editor Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society. "Paintball". Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009.
