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Identity Informs Motivation and Engagement-- Death Match of Social Learning
1) The interview discusses how sustained engagement in video game dance emerged through a desire to be part of a social group and experience the fun and status associated with mastery of the activity. 2) Play groups allow individuals to try on different identities and project emotions in a low-risk environment, helping to sustain engagement over time. 3) Motivating learning through play-like activities may help develop competencies while fostering self-determined and sustained engagement through social components like group membership and risk-taking.
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Identity Informs Motivation and Engagement-- Death Match of Social Learning
- 1. Why Video GamesSustain Engagement: A Death Match between Social Learning Theories Brock Dubbels The Center for Cognitive Sciences The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
- 2. Purpose: Obesity & Bone Density Importance of mechanical loading in promoting bone health. Activities such as jumping and gymnastics exert the kind of high impact force that develops bone. Regular & Sustained High Impact Force But do we have to force them?
- 4. Methodology: The modified phenomenologicalinterview van Manen (1996, p. 101)
- 5. Data Analysis • The critical discourse methods • “the scaffolding of human affiliation within cultures and social groups and institutions,” – Gee (1999, pg 1) • “how do existing societies provide people with the possibilities and resources for rich and fulfilling lives,” – Fairclough (2003, pg 202).
- 6. Sustained Engagement • When looking to measure growth or change, or even to understand whether a learner has truly engaged, an educator should also look for evidence of commitment and positive attitudes related to the activity and subject matter. • Engagement is not just doing the work, it is a connection and an affinity to an activity supported from the affective domains (Chapman, 2003). • Skinner & Belmont (1993, p.572) report that engaged learners show sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone and select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration. • Pintrich and & De Groot (1990, in Chapman) see engagement as having observable cognitive components that can be seen or elicited through exploring the learner’s use of strategy, metacognition, and self-regulatory behavior to monitor and guide the learning processes.
- 7.
- 8. Play is aportal to Self-Determination and Work Working hard at play?
- 9.
- 10. Playgroups Communities of Autonomy Practice Affinity Groups Supporting Groups • The domain: shared • Semiotic Domains domain of interest and shared are the key feature that • Self-Determination competence that distinguishes members from other people. make members Theory recognizable: • The community: – a set of practices, a • learner-led members engage in joint • Autonomy activities and discussions, help set of common goals each other, and share or endeavors, and a • Belonging information. They build relationships that enable them set of values and • Competence to learn from each other. norms • The practice: They – oral or written develop a shared repertoire of language, images, resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing equations, symbols, recurring problems—in short a sounds, gestures, shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. graphs, artifacts
- 11. With this inmind, it would seem possible that as the group eventually changed, or the activity changed, motivation would change and thus, group identity would change and affect the degree of engagement. In essence, identity would have informed motivation and engagement. Play may represent an important portal to engagement and recruiting the work ethos for learning acceleration—choice may be more prevalent in Play.
- 12. Play as Portal,Autonomous Environment, Belonging, Activity/Semiotics/competence I was excited because this was something I could participate in. I’ve played Halo and I’m not that good at it and everyone was starting out on this for the first time, so I thought I could be one of those good people at it and get respect from people. I was really excited. They have this huge TV at Devon’s house and everyone’s around you. I was kind of nervous too because you have to do this in front of people. Well, we were all kind of sitting on the couch watching the men and I was like I want to try it. I mean, some of them were interested in seeing me probably because they knew I never played before and they made me where I was probably going to fail, but then I actually really wanted to do it, so I was like I want to do it next! I thought I was going to be better at the game than I thought I was because I’m thinking oh these guys they don’t have any coordination. This’ll be easy for me. I’m kind of in shape, so I was thinking it would be pretty easy and then I do some of these songs and I was like oh, I need to go down a level! I thought I caught on fairly quickly.
- 13. “I could beone of those good people at it and get respect from people”
- 14. So how didyou do that first time? I PROBABLY FAILED.
- 15. • Belief in her ability to succeed was essential in her willingness to perform publicly. • Research on adolescents’ engagement in literacy for example has found that adolescent perceptions of their competence and ability to succeed may be a more important predictor of whether they will engage than their past performance. – (Alvermann, 2001; Anderman et al., 2001; Bean, 2000; Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). • Studies of adolescents have also found that they prefer to perform where they know they will have success – (Csikzhentmihaly, 2004).
- 16. So what followedwas me just trying to find where I could go to play. Then I kind of got eventually frustrated with it—well, not frustrated but I wanted to play more, so I decided to buy it for myself. Yeah. You play by yourself to get better to play with other people. I mean, it’s always fun to play by yourself and unlock new songs and things like that. I got it for Christmas from my parents, so I didn’t have to buy it but I had to persuade them and make sure they got me what I wanted. They didn’t really understand but they felt okay about it because it wasn’t something violent or anything like that. Then I was like look what I can do! They watched me. They thought it was kind of interesting. This was with my family on Christmas. Then my uncles and my little cousin who was maybe like seven, they all got really interested by it. So my fifty- year-old uncles are trying it and they’re getting really excited. My little cousin, she’s getting excited too. She doesn’t even really understand what’s happening on the screen but she’s like jumping around on the pad.
- 17. “Really, I wantedto hang out with them . . . games are fun.” and the proposition that might follow as if a syllogism, is that: gamers are fun, and I want to be fun too.
- 18. Yeah, it wasa school band trip. So a lot of us went and it turned out that a whole bunch of people knew what DDR was. It was interesting to see them play. Tyler and I, we kind of felt cool because our group that we had played with had progressed better than these other people that we were seeing play. They were like oh man this kid is so good and we play with him all the time. Tyler and I played against these people— Yeah, we beat them pretty bad.
- 19. Well, a lotof the guys that I started playing it with, they moved on to other games because that’s what they do. They focus in on something for a really long time and then they’ll find something else will be just released and everybody else will just be playing that, so they’ll jump into that. Then there was always the people who have it, like Tyler and I, who will still play it. We didn’t get bored with it; it’s just then there were other things. No. I don’t play it as much as I do anymore and my friendships through that have become different. I mean, we’re all still friends. DDR was just like this common thing that we had to like start us talking and then after that we talked about normal things. I became pretty good friends with a lot of people. I dated one of the guys that I met for awhile. I don’t know, it wasn’t like any different than like you meet people playing for a sports team. You have something in common and that’s what you’re coming together to do, and then you talk about other stuff because we’re not just focused on DDR. Well, at my work it’s kind of similar too. We’re all stuck working together and so then we get talking. Soccer and sports a lot. Any kind of group that you all come together and you have something to talk about and then we just eventually expand on that and that’s how we became friends.
- 20. “why did shesustain engagement? Principle 1 — Play as a Subjunctive Mode Principle 2 — Desirable Groups Principle 3 — Spaces Principal 4 — Desirable Activities
- 21. Cognitive Theories ofAction: we capture the imagination and build cognitive theories of action through imagery/ visualization (mental modeling). A key word for the instruction should be “IMAGINE”. Roles: provide roles and identities they can try on and play with, and offer the ability to change roles and play with the identities. A key word for instruction should be “IMITATE” Rules — aka, the Identity Tool Box — Provide rules, values, language, actions, and tools associated with the roles and identities (semiotic domains) that they can work with and act upon that are inherent to the task, where the performance is the assessment. Branching — Create choices and branching decision networks — and it is important here that the learners explain their cognitive theories of action and are asked to utilize and explain the identity tool box to support their choices and why they did what they did, and what might be next. Contingency/ Probability — this comes about when we consider the possible contingencies that might come from an action through prediction and hypothesis testing. Examples of this are resource management; awareness of likelihood of an action based upon knowledge of the game/ instructional environment, and attempted quantification and probability of failure/ success.
- 22. What happened? I ama gamer
- 23. HOW TO HELPYOUNG PEOPLE START AN ACTIVITY AND SUSTAIN ENGAGEMENT • What came out of the interview was: • the importance of aligning the outcomes with a desirable activity, • the importance of group and environment to the construction of status and identity that makes belonging to a group desirable; • allow for status and relation for reinforcement; • the centrality of ritual and rites of passage in group performance, • autonomy supporting environments, • and again the importance of identity construction for transformation to instantiate sustained engagement conveyed through affiliation, apprenticeship, and expertise.
- 24. hypothesis • With thisin mind, identity did inform motivation and engagement. Desire to be part of the group, as well as the fun of the work that was attributed to play helped to create the group identities.
- 25.
- 26. Why Play Groups? •This experience may be an example of young adults forming a play group, which is dependent upon sharing mutually original feelings without getting too deep or real, which represents an opportunity to try on and project different emotions and create what Corsaro (1985) called the Actors Dilemma.
- 27. What this meansfor learning Maybe we need to motivate and engage through recruiting play for developing work-like competencies.
- 28. Id = M+ S Engage • In this way, we can create kind self-determined learning. • Utilize semiotic domains and FTLs, as well as the event indexing model for evidence of gains. • Understand the importance of risk, and self-evaluation in safe group contexts for membership and sustained engagement. • Play is essential in creating these environments through creating structure for shared experience and reducing the threat of Freudian meltdowns • Games are a structured form of play • Work can be playful / play can be a lot of work • Play is powerful learning, and an important part of our identities.
Editor's Notes
- #3 having school children do just one minute of jumping (10-20 jumps) three times a day, three to five times a week caused the children to gain more bone mass. The downsides of such an activity is that it is not sustained enough to improve cardiovascular health or to promote weight loss. Because it is difficult to motivate children to participate in the type of cardiovascular activities that adults engage in (running, cycling, aerobics), new strategies must be developed. In Dance Dance Revolution, a participant responds to a series of directional arrows displayed on a video or TV screen to perform choreographed dance steps or hops synchronized to music. Song tempo and degree of difficulty increase as the player successfully progresses in the game. Because of the game's popularity and its cardiovascular exercise and jumping (bone-building) components, it could represent an appealing model for reducing physical inactivity in children.
- #5 The phenomenological interview methodology was modified to gather descriptions of the described lived experience in terms of what van Manen (1996, p. 101) called Fundamental Life Themes, or as they will be referred to for the sake of brevity: F.L.T.s. F.L.T.s are elements of human experience. They are structural elements of the phenomena of the experience of living in the world. These are really experiences of the self in the world from the traditions of in the world from Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre; also affiliated with the analysis built from Marxist traditions
- #6 not only provide methodologies that are fundamental to qualitative analysis, but are also fundamental to the study. and It was for this reason that these methods were used to explore and code the phenomenological interview transcript. Although a sample of one participant is not very robust for generalization, it provided a starting point for more focused theory testing, as well as to provide insights for ourselves as designers, and education practitioners.
- #9 Play may be a portal to working to develop skills, knowledge, and competency Play groups provide authentic shared experience without the need for Freudian meltdowns This also begins to create group membership and experience to talk about
- #11 Why we play in groups – CP relations, AG actions, ASG Control
- #13 The importance of participation and building recognizable credibility and membership. The center bet. Geertz Performing and risking in a social situation where you may fail publicly.
- #16 The fear of performing in front of the group with Autonomy/ Competence but that since people were just starting out, she might have a chance to be good at it and to be respected. This may have played an even larger role because she was one of the girls who watch, not one of “the men” who play the games and perform. The importance of the Activity Space and its affordances as well as the possible change in atmosphere with this new game, where there may have been more emphasis on Play as the Subjunctive Mood. This makes a case for the importance of Affective Commitment, Competence as well as a Cognitive Theory of Action. Although these seem to be sublevels of Desirable Activity and Belong to a Desirable Group, that inform and reinforce action. She had created a Cognitive Theory of Action and knew that it was essential for her to perform to be acknowledged and claim membership — another indication of Chapman ’s (2006) description of engagement and evidence of Identifiable Regulation. To claim Belonging to this Desirable Social Group, she realized whether implicitly or not, that she needed to participate through performance (Autonomy/Competence) to Belong. This supports Deci and Ryan’s position that Autonomy, Belonging, and Competence are basic needs that underlie motivation and engagement and satisfy Skinner and Belmont’s assertion of affective involvement. In addition, Ellen had already aligned her values internally as Identifiable Regulation– but she had not found an opportunity with a Desirable Activity where she might have success in the Activity Space where she could feel confident that she would succeed and enjoy the activity,
- #17 The need for Activity Spaces should not be underestimated, but it seemed clear that Ellen was ready and willing to share her activity in a space, her parents ’ holiday party to get the game system, mats, and software. Ellen ’s playing the game with family coincides with the Ritual of Integration/Aggregation as described by Van Gennep (1960), where Ellen has returned to her family with a new status. This status may not rival her accomplishments in sports, band or academics in her family’s values, but in many ways it was a revealing of how she had become different – how she had created difference and separated and returned, and her family’s embrace of this new part of her identity — “gamer girl”. Dance Dance Revolution, and other games played in Devon ’s basement provided an experience that offered the separation and initiation for obtaining group identity through the ritual of public performance that could be recognized not only by the group, but also by others away from the basement and through this the identity and status are further reinforced through the rite of integration. It was through the activity that Ellen was conferred status and identity as member not only by her new friends, but through her family and the community that had the power to convey her status and acceptance. This conferred new identity and acceptance allowed her to become that gamer beyond her normal relations and to extend her community network and be recognized by others to develop new relations and status:
- #18 As Ellen ’s ability with the game progressed, she was being recognized as DDR “gamer girl”, and this conferred a new identity and status. She began to find new connections throughout her school experience, as more people knew about her new status as a “gamer girl” beyond her former status as an International Baccalaureate student (Academic), varsity soccer player (Jock/Athlete), Band Member (Musician). It may have been important for Ellen to branch out and change people’s perceptions In the same way that she described the Desirable Group. Perhaps all that work in Academics, Sports, and Band had made her appear too serious, and maybe she felt constrained by all of her commitments and wanted to break out to meet new, fun people? It is only conjecture and anecdotal, and she did not abandon her commitment to band, sports, or academics — she did graduate with an IB diploma — but as can be imagined, all that work in those areas may have made it important to find friends who had interests beyond her everyday world, and that being with them would allow her to step away from conversations about the team, assignments, practicing to perform, and set her apart. Developing these relations more than fun, but a coping tool. The importance of play, according to Vygotsky (1972), is decontextualization, where an individual can gain gratification and pleasure even in the midst of unresolved issues and larger, time consuming projects. The role of pretense and imagination can bring about pleasure and in the face of uncontrollable circumstances; this can provide some relief. Perhaps the gaming provided an opportunity to decompress and laugh in the midst of all that responsibility and preparation. An example of this may be seen in Ellen ’s bringing the game on a band trip.
- #19 in this instance, the game activity did extend beyond the familiar Activity Spaces like Devon ’s basement; it even seemed to provide an activity that she could share with new groups as a Desirable Activity that would make others see her as part of a Desirable Group that others would seek Belonging/ Relatedness. The game seems to have supplanted the importance of being part of the gamer group in Devon’s basement, and the activity became a means for extending her friend network as Gee (2001) as an Affinity Group, where people affiliate because of an affinity for an activity. The next section demonstrates this. As the activity began to change for the group members, relationships started to change, and the emphasis on the game diminished.
- #20 The DDR game did facilitate the relationship in ways that other games and activities did not, but in the end, the initial motivation may need to come from purpose only the individual can formulate. But play can facilitate this and may make the entrance to a group, the practice, and eventual mastery of knowledge, activity space, and activity more likely to be enticing and possibly provide for sustained engagement and eventual mastery. This makes a case for Play as a Subjunctive Mood. Playgroups, and the activities that support them, provide a common ground for interaction. There is definitely a pecking order that comes from demonstrable competence and evidence of knowledge from the semiotic domains from the game. Games are built upon play, pretense, and decontextualization, but once these activities no longer provide pleasure and gratification, the activity may quickly end and the relationships and spaces that contextualize and support them may change in the way that Ellen ’s DDR group cooled off: “and my friendships though have become different. I mean, we’re all still friends. Games are structured forms of play, Dubbels (2008) that provide rules and roles that are defined to help members to decontextualize from the ordinary world where they have responsibility, deadlines, and environments they cannot control. These same rules and roles also help them know their status in the game, share common, spontaneous, and authentic experience without going too deep into personal motives, negative feelings, and Freudian meltdowns. Corsaro (1985) called this play group phenomenon the Actors Dilemma, and according to Corsaro, the Freudian meltdown, or oversharing, is one of the most common causes of playgroup breakup—perhaps play is the coping mechanism that allows for detachment and the ability to constructively work on what can be changed and separating from that which cannot be. Game roles may also allows for exploration of other peoples ’ values and experience in a safe space without getting too deep or real, which represents an opportunity to try on and project different emotions, and build comfort and trust through common experience. In terms of Ritual/ Rites of Passage, a game would be a means for rite of passage, where the Activity Space is no longer like the ordinary world, and rules and roles are different and even changed for the sake of experimentation and normal social and interpersonal boundaries can be tested without endangering status and relationships. With Play as the Subjunctive Mood, different parts of person can emerge and people can try on different personae without recrimination — because they are only playing
- #21 ” it became evident that her motivation to sustain engagement over time changed. She was attracted to the activity because she wanted to be friends with the kids who hung out at Devon’s basement — she wanted to be an acknowledged member of the group, not part of the fan club. To do this she had to perform and risk ridicule and a possible reduction in status. Geertz (1976) described this spatially in that the further away you were from the Center Bet, where the desirable activity takes place, the lower your status and importance to the main event and performers. In order to be part of this group, she needed to perform, but she might was hesitant to try because of the games they were playing did not mesh with her sense of play and fun—perhaps because the play of these group members with these games (Halo, Counterstrike) was already too far advanced for them to tolerate a “newb” (new player) at the controller; and it might be better not impose oneself and risk ridicule or contempt if one is not contributing to the play, learning, and or status of the group.
- #24 The issue under investigation is how to help young people start an activity and sustain it; the simple answer to this was, seemingly, to make it fun; to make it a high-interest activity; but many toys, games, and activities are often tried once and then put aside.
- #27 Why