Drawing on Video Games, Educators Land on Unlikely Idea: ‘Playful Assessment’
Drawing on Video Games, Educators Land on Unlikely Idea: ‘Playful Assessment’
Drawing on Video Games, Educators Land on Unlikely Idea: ‘Playful Assessment’
By Greg Toppo
January 30, 2024
Summary
"The idea is: Can assessment be more embedded?" said Y.J. Kim, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Can assessment be more exciting? Can assessment be more flexible?".
In November, NWEA, which publishes the widely used MAP Growth tests, unveiled a 3D digital assessment on the popular Roblox gaming platform that tests how well middle-schoolers have learned Newton's Second Law of Motion.
Researchers have been toying with the idea of more playful assessments for decades.
Shute devised the idea of "Stealth assessment," a system that discreetly tests students' learning in interactive and immersive environments such as digital games.
Kim has spent the past few years developing playful assessments for the classroom, originally with teachers, teacher trainees and game designers at MIT. Where Shute, her mentor at Florida State University, called it "Stealth assessment," Kim prefers the term "Playful assessment."
Kim has lately been testing something she calls the Assessment Party Game, a free, printable card game for teachers that Kim describes as "Charades meets Telephone" to teach the process of drawing conclusions from a chain of evidence.
Reference
Toppo, G. (2024, January 30). Drawing on Video Games, Educators Land on Unlikely Idea: “Playful Assessment.” https://www.the74million.org/article/drawing-on-video-games-educators-land-on-unlikely-idea-playful-assessment/