Writing Educational Research

What are the main points you would like to examine/discuss in this paper or research?

The traditional view of digital games as insufficiently serious for use in the classroom has come under scrutiny in recent years as gamification is gaining ground in the business world. However, it is slow to gain traction as its impact on achievement remains somewhat unproven.

I would like to look at current research and collect  data to ascertain if there are other qualities that a gamified environment might bring out in students. Is there data regarding qualities like persistence, leadership, or on-task behavior that can illustrate a value to game-based learning that extends beyond the acquisition of content-based knowledge? Can we potentially cultivate other values in students when we utilize digital games in schools? I will most certainly be examining the research of Jane McGonigal and James Gee as I seek to analyze data regarding gamification to determine if there is a secondary argument in favour of its use in education.

Secondary questions would include:

•       Are there qualities that a gamified learning environment can draw out of students; qualities like persistence, leadership, or on-task behavior?
•       If there is evidence to show the presence of these qualities, does this provide a secondary value for the use of digital games in education?

January 27, 2016 – D2L Post – Post your initial abstract

I could obsess and edit this for days. I’m going to take the plunge and post the first draft of my abstract.  I have structured it to be a literature review, given the length of time that we have for this course. If there is a way that I might be able to do more than a literature review, I would love to; but at this point in time, keeping it reasonable is also a goal.

So, here you go – rip it apart and help me improve my academic writing.  I think that I may need to increase my specificity as to the skills I am referencing, (leadership, persistence) but I’m not sure how in-depth to go with that. Maybe I’m being reticent because the paper itself isn’t actually written yet.

Anyway, first draft….

Gamification is a complicated and contentious topic in education. The traditional view of digital games as insufficiently serious for use in the classroom has come under scrutiny in recent years as gamification is gaining ground in the business world. This paper will challenge the notion that games are superfluous to the classroom environment. This document uses previously researched data to show that a game-based learning environment can draw important skills from students that traditional lecture-based classroom processes typically do not. This literature review will examine current research through a constructivist lens to examine gamification as a significant positive contributor to students developing the proficiencies necessary for the demands of employment in the twenty-first century.  The study will highlight considerations for the usage of games in the classroom that will be palatable to all stakeholders; students, teachers, administrators and parents. In doing so, it will recontextualize the value of digital games in public schools, and give consideration for future research into the differences between the genders as they relate to skills acquisition in a gamified environment.

February 3, 2016 – D2L Posting

Belcher (2009, p. 69 – 82), provides us with an extensive list of criteria and advice for publication and I am left wondering how I am going to manage to write a piece that adheres to all of these important standards. I am confident in my vocabulary, grammar and mechanics, and that will allow me to start confidently on the path of writing a worthwhile piece.

My primary concern with respect to writing with the quality required for academic publication is the confident voice. I am going to have to work on making statements with certitude, not probability. Belcher (2009, p.76) instructs us to “make statements such as “I argue that” or “the thesis of this paper is” so as to clearly present that the writer is the owner of the points and the arguments. It is easy (less risky) to be vague about arguments, not taking ownership of them, and I am going to need to look carefully for this error in my writing. I am reticent to present myself as thinking I know more about something than I actually do. I am becoming increasingly well-read in the areas I am working in; but I am acutely aware that I am, by no means, an expert. However, I am going to need to learn to write with a voice of expertise, despite reticence within myself. I am continually concerned that my knowledge of a topic does not possess the breadth or depth to be writing with the strength that I am trying to achieve. The result is that I procrastinate writing by reading more. And then I find myself back in the loop of not writing regularly as Belcher (2009, p.21) instructs us to do.

My concerns continually go back to the concept of my voice. To strike the balance between having my arguments sufficiently supported by existing literature, without writing a paper that is excessively documented (Belcher, 2009, p.74). To find my own confidence to write without having my words lost in “the babble of cited authors” (Belcher, 2009, p,75).

I am also a little concerned that I may turn out a data driven article. Belcher (2009, p.87) cautions us that “textual analysis and field studies are particularly likely to fall prey to the problem of writing data-driven articles”. As I am intending to do a literature review, as I will not be engaging in primary research during this term. I will need to be cautious in my editing so that I do not write a data-driven article that is void of argument.

The primary argument in my paper will be: A gamified learning environment brings out positive character qualities in the players who engage in the game.

February 12, 2016 – D2L Post – Structure for my Article

To compare and contrast an article with similar methodology to the one I am writing, I have selected an article from Review of General Psychology. Written by Przybylski, Ryan & Rigby (2010), the article is titled A Motivational Model of Video Game Engagement.  This article is relevant to my research as I am interested in the peripheral and subsidiary outcomes of gaming outcomes different than the delivery of curriculum and the achievement of curricular outcomes. Certainly, motivation in the classroom is an ongoing topic in education.

The article has a macro structure starting with an introduction, moving forward into the topic of motivation, broadening into a lengthy discussion of the psychological needs that can be met by video games, ending with a conclusion, an acknowledgment of the limitations of the evidence and then indicating future directions and closing the article. These elements align with the macro structure of the Humanities Article that Belcher (2009) brings to our attention on page 180.

This article focuses in specifically on the competence need, the autonomy need and the relatedness need as they tie to Cognitive Evaluation Theory. The article has done as Belcher (2009) instructs and has been “carefully organized around a single significant idea” (p.184). isolated three psychological needs based on a pre-existing theory; it has not maintained the broadness of general psychological needs within the whole of Psychological study. My article is going to need to have an overarching theme that it ties back to in order to maintain the focus of the topic at hand. I need to be cautious to not “string together tiny insights without any organizing principle” (Belcher, 2009, p.182).

My article will be written in the Humanities Article Structure (Belcher, 2009, p.180). I Will be following the process of “presenting a piece of evidence, interpreting, suggesting how the evidence supports the argument and repeating this process” (Belcher, 2009, p.180). I will be writing as a narrative (thank you for the clarification on this methodology during our Adobe Connect session earlier this week) as opposed to as a literature review as I had initially indicated was my plan.

February 23, 2016 D2L Post – What Strategies do you relate to?

What strategies (Giroux, Wilson, Herding – in Belcher, 2009 p. 149-150) can you relate to in reviewing the literature sources and how do using specific strategies help you to navigate through the material, cite sources, and document references?

I am going to start by saying that I do not relate to Giroux at all. His method of cutting and pasting terrifies me in terms of plagiarism. I can envision it as a successful strategy if I go back in my head to a time when he would have been working with scissors and glue to accomplish this task, but in a digital age when the copied text appears in a document appearing the same as the author’s actual words, it feels to me like an utter risk to proceed in such a fashion.  Belcher underscores the critical importance of not plagiarizing when she states that “Plagiarizing is no longer a lottery game where it is unlikely that your name will ever be picked. It is now an absolute that you will be caught” (2009, p.160). To be candid, I am far too scared of making a mistake to even entertain a copy-paste mechanism in writing. Does anyone in our cohort feel comfortable copy-pasting? If you do, what strategies do you employ to be certain you don’t accidentally plagiarize?

If I had the time to commit, I could potentially relate to Wilson’s strategy of reading on a daily basis. While I am struggling with adhering to a schedule of writing daily, I think that I could actually enjoy reading daily. As for spending two hours writing at one of the tables, I have to admit that that doesn’t sound entirely bad!

I think Herding’s strategy is similar to Wilson in that there was a daily schedule for reading. His strategy is actually my favourite as it appears his writing strategy was somewhat flexible. With 250 scholarly articles and books to his credit, he was clearly a prolific writer in addition to a voracious reader.

I am finding that I love reading and scanning the literature. I can easily lose two to three hours in the University’s online library reading abstracts, previewing articles and saving entire articles that I deem “keepers”. I am also finding that many of my “keepers” prove superfluous to my actual writing. I would estimate that for every four articles that I deem a “keeper” only one actually is. I would like to better train myself to more accurately identify work that is valuable to the research I am conducting.

Am I the only one that finds that they start out too broad in their scope of what is an actual valuable article? I am thinking that when I start researching, I may hold a fear that there won’t be enough literature, and so I keep too much, only to find out that there is, indeed, a large body of literature pertaining to my topic that can easily be pared down.

March 8, 2016 D2L Posting – Essential Elements of my Article

Problem Statement – When we are considering the value of games in our schools, we need to look beyond the curricular outcomes and consider the secondary achievements games may offer; the qualities they cultivate in students who are engaged in this style of learning. A gamified learning environment has the potential to foster characteristics like leadership, self–directed learning, persistence, flexible thinking, creativity, empathy and a host of other outcomes not measured by standardized testing, yet critical to success in the twenty-first century work world.

Research Questions – Can a gamified learning environment bring out leadership qualities in students who have shown a preference for solitude or an introverted personality type?

Methodology – I will be writing an ethnographic piece outlining the specific observations I have made in my own classroom as it pertains to this theme. While I have not engaged in a specific piece of action research on this topic, I am working on refining a means of making my observations more measurable within the context of action research. To this end, I will be relying on the research of others who have conducted their work in similar settings to try to bring the research together in a manner to assist me with pinpointing my research design for my collaboratory work.

Methods – My method is going to be an ethnography for this course. However, I will be continuing my observations in my classroom and will conduct a practice run of my planned action research for my official collaboratory work. I do not expect to report on this for this paper.

Assumptions – I have an obvious assumption that I think I have previously observed leadership skills emerging from unlikely students. I will have to be aware of my bias as I replicate the situation where I feel this has presented in the past.

Definitions – I will need to have a solid definition of leadership, as well as criteria for identifying students who model a preference for solitude or introversion on a daily basis.

According to Fish (2011, p.83), “Leadership is concerned with taking courageous action, so students need practice taking risks and making mistakes. Leadership is tied to caring and the betterment of others, so students need practice understanding the emotions of others and developing empathy. And leadership is inherently involved with the functioning of groups, so students need practice developing their emotional intelligence and facility”

Delimitations and Limitations – Challenges will include certainty about student identity in terms of seclusion, solitude and introversion. I will be conducting my action research with groups of grade nine students, many of whom are in their third year in my school, in an attempt to be more confident as to the personalities and traits of the students involved.  Keeping this simple enough, but still comprehensive is going to present a challenge.

March 26, 2016 – Advancing the Evidence

As I continue to write, my work is most certainly ethnographic and the evidence forming is qualitative. There is a basis in my own observation, though it is not formal observation constructed with strict rubrics and solid criteria. My observations are of human behaviour, and I am searching for literature that either supports or refutes what it is that I think I have observed. There is a growing body of research in the area of gamification and learning outcomes, but I have yet to find a piece that specifically addresses leadership, never mind leadership in introverted students. I think that may turn out to be the gap in the research that I would like to begin to address.

The strengths I have in terms of evidence are the books and scholarly articles that have been written on gamification and game-based learning in the past decade. The weakness is the lack of research and literature specific to what I am trying to prove or disprove. A challenge that presents is that I am trying to bring research from both gamification and psychology together. I am trying to argue that students with a  preference for solitude, or an introverted nature have the ability to access powerful personal characteristics in a gamified environment.

In terms of writing up my research, I am going to have to be cautious about the use of the passive voice (Belcher, 2009, p.193). Being firm in statements, without the use of “I” is going to present a bit of a challenge, as I attempt to write about personal observations without bringing myself into the structure of the writing!!

A question: Are we to absolutely never use “we” or “I”, or is it just to be avoided?  If I am speaking about my observations, I don’t want to make what I am saying seem more generalized than just that “I have observed…..” Saying something like “It has been observed that….” to me makes it sound like it may have potentially been more than just I who have observed this, and to my knowledge, it’s just me who thinks this. How do I accurately portray my personal observations while still adhering to the passive voice structure?

March 30, 2016 – My Belcher Diagnostic Results for my Article

First of all, I thought the use of the replace all feature in Word for this diagnostic was brilliant.  It took about five minutes to get the system in place where I was doing it correctly on my Mac, but all the controls are there.  After searching for “and”, I accidentally had it set to be searching for the subsequent words in red, not in black, so it was finding nothing. That felt suspicious after a couple of results of zero on some very common words, so I started over, and it was easily accomplished. It took me about thirty minutes to complete the analysis, and here are my results:

19 not
3 very

52 ent
16 ence
64 ion
5 ize

132 ed (passive voice)

54 ly

I love that I have this analysis now to begin final revisions. I clearly have some areas that require attention; but to be able to go through my work in a larger lens, as opposed to trying to work sentence by sentence to achieve the message I am trying to communicate.

April 13, 2016 – Personal Reflection posted on D2L

Belcher, W. L. (2009). Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications

Fish, T. S. (2011). Teaching leadership to all. Independent School, 71(1), 80-85.

Przybylski, A. K., Scott Rigby, C., Ryan, R. M. (2010).  A motivational model of video game engagement Review of General Psychology 14(2) 154-166.