Scaffolding and Assessing Teachers’ Examination of Games for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This chapter is situated in an 11-week doctoral study (April–June 2013) that applied the Game Network Analysis (GaNA) framework to scaffold and assess 14 pre-service teachers’ knowledge and skills for game-based learning (GBL) around 3 focal areas, namely, game analysis, game integration, and ecological conditions. The chapter illustrates how formative and summative assessments were created using the GaNA framework (a) to support participating pre-service teachers to examine games as a form of curriculum and (b) to afford the researcher to qualitatively and quantitatively capture the change in teachers’ game literacy and the extent to which it was integrated with teachers’ design of game-based lesson plans. The chapter presents group findings and an illustrative case study of Max, a male pre-service English/language arts teacher learning (a) to examine the situated affordances and constraints of games through direct and vicarious ways, (b) to document their findings about a game, and (c) to reflect on the possibilities of repurposing a game for curricular use. The chapter concludes with implications for researchers and teacher educators interested in supporting teachers to adopt technological and pedagogical innovations where learning is mediated through play.