Assessment in Game-Based Learning

Research on Game-Based Assessment

Games are interactive rule systems in which players take on roles to achieve goals. The space of games includes board games, sports, live-action role-playing games, alternative reality games, and video games. Much of the attention of the games-based assessment research community has focused on the potential of video games as assessments. Video games are promising occasions for assessment for several reasons:

• Games immerse players in challenges that eliminate the gap between the time of learning and the time of assessment. Completing the game challenge is evidence that the player has mastered the mechanics of play and can perform the desired skills and behaviors designed into the game world.
• Video games create a digital data trail, or data exhaust, that enables researchers to trace the patterns of play within the game world as evidence of how players navigate the game.
• Video games motivate players to learn and perform complex behaviors. Video games provide virtual worlds in which players can create experiences by taking on roles, experiment with strategies, pursue goals, and interact socially with characters within and outside of the game world.

Taken together, these features highlight the potential for game-based assessment to transform assessment from a summative process that follows learning into a formative process that unfolds during the course of play.

Game-based learning research focuses on data generated from within games and outside games. Dirk Ifenthaler and his colleagues distinguish between external and embedded assessment of game-based learning. Much of the prior research in game-based assessment has focused on external assessment, in which game performance is compared to a test from outside the game context. In external assessment, pre- and posttests are used to capture the degree to which learning occurred as a result of play. External assessments can be developed to measure whether players acquire the content model embedded in the game world, whether players acquire professional skills and knowledge from game-play, or whether gameplay leads to socially desirable or undesirable behaviors and dispositions. Embedded research focuses on understanding learning by using data generated by the game context itself. Most contemporary approaches to game-based assessment use both external and embedded assessment to make sense of learning in games.