Scalable Game Design Initiative - Programming Goes Back to School

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148567-programming-goes-back-to-school/fulltext

by YAFZ • 14 years ago

1 1 14 years ago

cacm.acm.org

YAFZ• 14 years ago

The "Pedagogy" section is superb: "Systematically investigate the interaction of pedagogical approaches and motivational levels so that teachers can broaden participation. With school sites in Alaska, California, Georgia, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming and over 10,000 student-created games and simulations, we were able to explore a uniquely rich set of motivational and educational data.6 We found the main common factor supporting motivational levels and skills across different school contexts, gender, and ethnicity was scaffolding. Of all the factors we considered, scaffolding was the only significant one. Scaffolding, a pedagogical aspect indicating the degree and kind of support provided by a teacher, was assessed through classroom observation. Direct instruction, which provides a very high degree of scaffolding, highly polarized motivational levels between boys and girls. With direct instruction a teacher provides step-by-step instructions at a detailed level (for example, "click this button," "paint the frog green"). Direct instruction is particularly unappealing to girls. With less scaffolding, such as with guided discovery, a teacher employs a more inquiry-based approach that includes classroom discussion (such as "what should we do?" and "how can we do this?"). In guided discovery, the motivational levels of girls not only approached the motivational levels of boys but often exceeded it. In a number of classes, using guided discovery raised the motivational levels of girls to 100%. This is exciting because it suggests that broadening participation is not a question of difficult-to-change factors such as school affluence. Preconceived notions such as lower interest of girls in programming turned out to be unsubstantiated. Even in cases where most literature would suggest a gender effect, for instance if there were significantly fewer girls in a class, we found that the right level of scaffolding could raise the level of motivation in girls to be even higher than that of boys."

Scalable Game Design Initiative - Programming Goes Back to School

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