Editor’s Note: Richard Van Eck is an associate professor of instructional design and technology in the UND College of Education and Human Development’s Department of Teaching and Learning.  He is a nationally recognized expert in the use of computer-based games in the classroom who has developed a wide array of strategies for the testing, use, and evaluation of these games in secondary and post-secondary education as well as for use in training in the workplace. Van Eck’s article on digital game-based learning was featured recently on the cover of Educause Review, and he has a book chapter on building intelligent learning games due out this year.

Q. President Bush’s latest State of the Union address called attention to science and math education. The President wants lots more secondary school science and math teachers to boost America’s student performance in these areas. But putting more science and math teachers in schools is likely a stopgap measure that doesn’t address what many education researchers see as a fundamentally flawed system of instruction. It’s clear from calls such as the President’s that American secondary school students may be falling behind the rest of the world in science and math. What do you see as the problem?

A. First of all, I should say that not everything about our system of education is flawed. On the whole, it has worked fairly well during the last century; the high school graduation rate has steadily increased to around 70 percent nationwide and the UN reports a 99.9 percent literacy rate for the United States. Of course, when one looks at performance on standardized tests compared to other countries, we don’t do quite as well, with the U.S. below the mean scores on virtually all standardized tests for all countries. However, we also need to understand that when we are comparing ourselves to other countries, we are in many cases comparing apples to oranges. Many countries do not strive to provide access to education for all citizens the way we do in the U.S. In this country, we believe that access to education is a right that should be available to everyone, which means our average test scores will be lower than these other countries.

Second, we have many dedicated teachers in our education system who are doing amazing work at reaching kids and engaging them in learning. This has become more commonplace during the last 15 years as a result of the movement toward collaborative learning, authentic problem-based learning, and technology integration in our classrooms. But these teachers are in the minority, in my opinion largely because the system we have does not easily support situated learning, problem-based learning, and learner-centered curriculum in general. After the fourth grade, which is about the time we shift from learner-centered curriculum and project-based learning to “traditional” instruction, U.S. students drop steadily from being at or above the mean for all countries on standardized test scores. U.S. students make less progress from grades 9 to 12 than they did from grades 5 to 8.

As a result, 64 percent to 83 percent of U.S. students fall below proficiency levels in math, reading, science and writing upon graduating from high school (at the current rate of 70 percent). While some may differ on the causes of these problems, there is no doubt that we are facing a growing crisis in educationTwo areas in particular concern me and are the focus of my research. The first problem is that we do very little to engage children in learning throughout much of their formal education. This problem arises from the industrial revolution and what I call the “widgetizing” of education. America embraced the idea of mass production and economies of scale that arose out of the Industrial Revolution. It seemed we thought “if we can be more effective by centralizing and expanding production in the industrial sector, why not take the same approach to education?” So we tried to mass-produce learning by centralizing and concentrating teaching for large numbers of students, as if they were widgets and could all be treated the same. The problem with this is that each student has different prior knowledge, different skills and abilities, and different strategies for learning. One instructor teaching 30 students cannot individualize learning, so most instructors teach to the mythical “middle” student, which is too fast for half the class, and too slow for 25 percent. This formal education system also removed learning from any meaningful context, which not only made it harder to make learning relevant (and relevance is key not just for motivation, but for activating meaningful knowledge structures and schemas in the brain to help encode new information), but also made it harder to teach. This is because we now know from researchers such as Piaget, Bransford, and Brown that learning is most effective when it is situated in meaningful contexts. It reflects the natural learning process all humans go through during their lifespans; there is an evolutionary pre-disposition toward situated learning.

Q. You said there were two problems….

A. The second problem is related, but more recent; the changing media and technology practices since 1980 has created learners whose brains are literally and figuratively different than the generations that preceded them (our teachers). The rate of change in our technology and media is exponential, and we are well into the beginning of the steepest part of the curve. At the same time, research into brain development and what is now being called brain plasticity shows that contrary to what we once believed, the brain continues to develop throughout our lifespan. Further, the brain is highly influenced by the ways we use it and the things we put into it. Given this exponential rate of change in technology and media, and the ability of technology and media to change, or ‘re-wire’ the brain, we are now finding that many kids today are radically different kinds of thinkers and consumers of information. As a result, we are even less equipped to engage them than we were with previous generations. These kids grew up in a radically different world where technology plays a huge role in daily life; it’s everywhere for them. We (their parents, their teachers, etc.) don’t necessarily keep with it the way that they do.

Q. But isn’t work or output from the classroom the problem? We hear that kids today don’t work as hard and aren’t as motivated as previous generations. Why should we cater to what some would call their laziness instead of asking them to meet higher standards?

A. We’re all reading a lot of the same thing: most recently, a piece in USA Today said we should “blame the kids” for not working harder, taking more initiative in the classroom. We keep hearing the question “what’s wrong with today’s generation?” We heard that in Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” which made a lot of waves when it was first published in 1987. We hear that people are less competent to even balance their checkbooks, that young kids today “don’t get it” and have no attention span, and that American civilization is going down the tubes.

Here’s the real problem: we’re measuring or judging these kids with yardsticks developed in another era. Before written language and much later the printing press, literacy and productivity were measured by oral communication skills. Many decried the mass production of the book, because they feared it would kill oral communication skills. And you know what? They were right by their yardsticks. I’d wager that 100 years after the printing press, very few bards could be found who could recite the Iliad as it had been done before. But the ability to do so became less central to culture and productivity, because reading was at least as important. People did not stop being productive; they learned to be more productive, and in different ways. Later, the newspaper was said to be the end of reading books, that radio would kill reading all together, and that television would kill radio. In fact, none of these media have died out; each promotes different skills; it is the way we use them that has changed. Every new technology brings those kinds of concerns. But we’re using old yardsticks. What’s happening is that literacy changes. What was literate for us and our grandparents just isn’t literate for today’s younger generation of digital natives (those for whom digital technology and information are as natural as the telephone is to us).

Now, we’re worried because kids “have short attention spans” or “can’t balance a checkbook.”  Watch a kid play a computer game for 6 hours, oblivious to the outside world and tell me he or she has a short attention span. Watch a kid doing homework while listening to an iPod, IMing (instant messaging) with six friends, and talking on a cell phone at the same time, and tell me kids can’t pay attention or process information. They can. They’ve got phenomenal attention spans. The question is, how are we defining and measuring attention span, and does that reflect the new world of information technology that these kids are immersed in? Maybe their attention span with a textbook is short, but if someone from Homer’s time were to test our attention spans and communication skills by insisting we memorize and sing the Iliad, they’d find us sorely lacking as well. And why are we surprised to find kids cannot balance a checkbook, when for them, banking is something you do online via computer or cell phone? This exponential change in technology and media has outstripped our ability both to meet their educational needs and to assess their abilities in a much shorter time span than at any other point in our history.

Q. How does that change affect teaching?

A. Our teaching methods simply have not kept up with the new realities of the electronic age. This is NOT to say teachers have not kept up with technology; rather, teachers and students today are fundamentally different in the ways and amount they use technology, and in the ways that this has affected the way they think and process information. We used to think that brain development was pretty much the same for all people, and that not much could change once we reach adulthood---we now know that’s not true. Brain-based research tells us that our brains change based on input. The February 2006 issue of Wired magazine talks about one researcher who studied a Tibetan monk who logged 10,000 hours of meditation; that monk generated gamma waves at 30 times the level of anyone else. The way he used his brain changed the way it worked. A study in the journal Nature showed that as few as 10 hours of video game play for those who had never played a game before improved visual processing in several ways that were once thought to be unchangeable to any meaningful degree.

Kids are exposed to so much media, and interact with that media so differently than we do that MRIs and CAT scans reveal physical changes in the brain, which researchers hypothesize results in different abilities to work with information. When we take these kids out of what is for them their natural environment (multiple streams of information, self-directed learning, and instant retrieval of information from multiple sources) they can’t function.

Q. What does this says about education?

A. The party’s over! With the Industrial Revolution, we moved away from the traditional situated learning method, where you learned by doing in an apprenticeship, to a system that mimicked the mass production of widgets. We mass produced education. It was a terribly flawed system from the beginning and you could argue that we should have moved away from it long ago. Learning works best at an individualized level. You build connections with what a student knows. You can’t do that very well with a 30-to-1 ratio in the classroom with 50 minutes of straight instructional time devoted to individual subjects. Some have estimated that when you remove all the time spent in transportation to and from school, getting to and from activities while at school, and the time spent during lunch, recess, classroom management, and announcements, the average student receives 3 hours of instruction per day. You end up teaching content in isolation (from meaningful context and from other subjects) to a common denominator; just about everyone loses out in this system. Those who succeed do so in spite of, not because of, these conditions. Drill and practice of low level verbal information (the easiest thing to attain under these conditions) is not getting the job done; we are not developing problem solvers. We’re not adapting our teaching methods to today’s real-world situation. We have got to find ways to make education more engaging (which is not necessarily the same thing as making it fun or enjoyable) and reflective of the patterns of learning and thinking that our kids bring to the classroom. We used to do this by doing things with project-based learning, situated learning, discovery learning, and problem-based learning. These are still the most effective ways to teach and learn today, but we have to find ways to do it that ALSO match the flow of information and learning in the modern information technology world. We need to understand how these kids literally think different, and adapt our pedagogies to take advantage of the new ways of thinking that will come to be the norm in the next 10 years.

Q. So how does the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind policy fit into this new teaching paradigm that you’re talking about?

A. It doesn’t. Assessment is a critical component of all instruction and all educational systems, but it is just one component. The problem is that No Child Left Behind is setting schools up for failure; it doesn’t do anything at all to fix what’s wrong. It’s great to know where our students are in their learning, but only two things are possible as a result: our students are all at or above the levels they need to be, or they are not. If they are, great, NCLB says, then everything is working fine. If not, what should we do? NCLB does not provide any guidance or funding to fix what’s wrong, it can only tell us that something is wrong. The other problem: what is NCLB assessing? What people don’t understand is that the tests can only tell us how kids are doing on the objectives those tests are designed to measure. These standardized tests do a great job testing content knowledge, a so-so job testing application of that knowledge, and a terrible job at testing problem-solving and critical thinking, which are arguably the most important goals of our educational system.

It’s another example of using outdated yardsticks that measure only certain kinds of learning. We need to have a national conversation in this country about what we really want kids to be able to do in each of these content areas, rather than what they should know. Everyone recognizes that knowing and being able to apply knowledge are two different things, but we don’t acknowledge this fact at the highest level of our  educational systems. These tests are designed to measure what students know, not how what they know is applied in the real world. It turns out that these standardized tests not only create generations of test takers who can’t apply what they know in the real world, it also creates a culture of education where the test drives learning, which in turn results in some of the least effective instructional strategies and approaches because we teach everything at the level of verbal information, and outside of any meaningful context.

Q. You study games in learning; how does that relate to these problems?

A. First, let’s be clear about what digital game-based learning (DGBL) can’t do: it’s not the ultimate solution to all of education’s problems. As with any educational tool, we need to understand its limitations. DGBL is not a panacea; it will not work for all learners, all content, all the time. In this regard, it is no different than the lecture or any other pedagogical approach. Games are not all the same; Jeopardy-style games will be good for low-level skills like verbal information, while adventure games will be better for problem-solving, and arcade/action games will be good for promoting speed of response (e.g., for fluency with the times table or recall of facts). Second, it is NOT about motivation and fun. It is about the ability of these technologies to both engage the mind of these new digital natives in ways that reflect how they process information naturally, and to embody the sound educational theories and approaches that have been around for hundreds of years. I speak and write about this issue in particular, because while DGBL is becoming popular, I fear that it will be misused and misapplied if people do not understand what educational principles it supports and use that knowledge to adapt it to meet the needs of the existing curriculum.

But national educational policy is not moving fast enough; kids are different today and brain-based learning research clearly recognizes that games can be effective as learning tools. But the powers-that-be are deeply suspicious. Of course, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed when considering any new approaches to teaching. Unfortunately, I think this is also coupled with misconceptions and a lack of knowledge about DGBL as well. “Why,” they ask, “should we have to make learning fun? Whole generations got by just fine on our model of teaching.” The problem with this is manifold. First, schools DID change from generation to generation (books, to newspapers, to filmstrips, to movies, to televisions, to computers), so the need to change our schools to reflect such changes in the media and culture has always been a part of our educational system. Second, the pace of technological change in the last 20 years as we’ve begun our climb up the steepest slope of this exponential curve has FAR exceeded the amount of change we’ve ever had to accommodate in any other comparable time period, so the need to change and the amount of that change has never been higher than it is now. Third, the question is based on a false assumption, namely, that new approaches like DGBL are predicated solely on the need to make learning fun, or to meet frivolous desires and preferences of students. Learning does NOT have to be fun to be effective, and our guide should ALWAYS be what is the best for learning. That is actually the reason that we need to begin to explore new models like DGBL; not because it makes learning fun, but because it embodies the most effective learning principles we’ve ever known, such as situated learning, problem-based learning, cognitive disequilibrium, assimilation and accommodation, and discovery. And in any case, just because learning does not HAVE to be fun does not mean it CAN’T. Finally, not only are computer games good at promoting problem-solving and critical thinking, they can also be tied to existing curriculum. There are many good examples out there of games like Civilization (history), The Sims (social psychology and life skills), and Rollercoaster Tycoon (mathematics, physics, and business) being used to teach and assess the standards and objectives mandated by our states and the federal government.

Q. So where is this all going?

A. It all boils down to this: students are now so different that they’ve completely outgrown our educational system, whereas previous generations merely found it a difficult fit. We know that games can be effective as learning tools, but we don’t want to get seduced by the medium. There are differences among games: some are good, some aren’t. Even among the good ones, some are better at teaching higher or lower-level intellectual skills. We have to understand what, where, when, how, and with whom to use different games for different learning outcomes. We also have to recognize that DGBL is just one of many possible approaches.

With games, today’s digital natives learn how to interact and solve the often extremely complex problems in a game without recourse to direct instruction. They do not read books or watch movies to learn how to do this; they learn through interacting with the game in a constant cycle of input, feedback, hypothesis formulation and testing, etc. These are things that we don’t normally teach well in the classroom because of time and the difficulty of addressing such higher order thinking skills with the diverse skills sets and abilities we have in our classrooms. Games can be very effective tools to teach problem-solving skills in addition to supporting instructional content through being integrated with existing curriculum.

I myself went to public school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was an unexceptional student, to say the least. I had ability, but I was not engaged in school, I did not enjoy the things I was doing. I spent a lot of time reading and playing games (my parents had a 2,000 book library in our home and a Heathkit H-8 kit computer), and I wondered even in third grade why my classes could not be more engaging like the books and games I experienced. I intuitively felt that I was engaged and learning during those activities; just not in the kinds of content that my teachers seemed to expect.

I got into teaching because I always liked helping people learn how to do things for themselves; it’s very rewarding to see the sense of empowerment they get from gaining expertise. I also knew, however, that there had to be other ways to teach that would be more effective for kids like I was. During my dissertation and my subsequent research, I’ve learned a lot about the established pedagogical theories that underly games that led to both my own engagement and effort. For me, it’s about making learning engaging and rewarding, and games are one way this can be done. DGBL is not about fun, although I see no reason learning cannot be fun. It’s more about what a game player once put as “hard fun.” Good education means that you’re willing to work very, very hard because it has value for you, and DGBL is one way we can engage the current generation of digital natives. Kids will look at DGBL and say it’s about fun, of course, and although we (may) know better, I see no reason not to let them think that.