{"id":2594,"date":"2011-05-06T06:00:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com\/tlb\/?p=2594"},"modified":"2020-09-29T10:12:50","modified_gmt":"2020-09-29T15:12:50","slug":"using-video-games-to-improve-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com\/tlb\/using-video-games-to-improve-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Video Games to Improve Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Check<\/a> \"\"<\/a>The work Brock Dubbels has done surrounding games has led to improvement in reading scores<\/strong>. In this article he explains the successful approaches and strategies in using video games and play to tackle the achievement gap and improve scores in reading<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

“In 2006-2007, I took over the Language Arts Instruction for an entire middle school in Minneapolis, MN. The students were primarily drawn from North Minneapolis, qualified for free and reduced lunch, and were very bright, but were not scoring well on the standardized assessments. I implemented a curriculum that studied video games as new forms of narrative. Games tell stories, just like the anthologies stacked on my shelves. The difference was that when I pulled out the\u00a0anthologies, classroom management became more challenging, as most of the kids were willing to get a behavioral referral than sit through reading \u201cThe Treasure of Lemon Brown\u201d from the anthology.<\/p>\n

These referrals were a lot of work, and there is no academic learning happening during that process.<\/p>\n

I decided that instead of pushing stories at them, I should ask them what kind of media they liked. Most of them told me that they played video games and liked television, but few if any had any idea that there was anything of value in games besides entertainment. There was no hidden genius here\u2013that somehow kids are digital natives and have great knowledge and critical thinking skills with video games and television, where they didn\u2019t with printed text. The difficulty that I was facing came from a large percentage (38%) had a cutscore of 1 on the Minnesota Basic Skills Test (MBST)\u2013 a test based upon recall\u2013 and we were about to face the Minnesota Comprehension Assessment 2 (MCA2), which is a comprehension assessment based upon the standards for reading and literature. My kids were all\u00a0bright, but they were not engaging, and they were not getting practice identifying the kind of conceptual development necessary to do well: they were not learning literary elements and genre patterns<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I was not sure whether this was because they couldn\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

So I decided to find out and created a curriculum of game study<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The organizing principle was that games are new forms of narrative, and that by studying game narratives, I could teach them literary elements and genre patterns. I created rubrics and assignments from the literary elements from the\u00a0Minnesota\u00a0state standards and integrated ideas from traditional Language Arts curriculum.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is what happened:\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You will notice that between Seventh grade (Blue) and the Eighth grade the following year (Green) there was significant improvement<\/strong> in the school column. During that eighth grade year, I had all of the eighth -graders\u2013but more importantly, we had a significant gain in a year when we switched from the Minnesota Basic Skills Test\/ Minnesota Comprehension Assessment to the MCA2, which is a significantly harder test.<\/p>\n

What you see in comparing my eighth-graders (GREEN) with the eighth-graders the\u00a0year before (RED) was that there was a significant difference in achievement differences in the bottom performers<\/strong> (who are the hardest to move btw) \u2013significantly fewer, a change of 9% in comparing eighth grade to eighth grade in \u201cDoes Not Meet\u201d, and a 12% improvement between the 05-06 seventh-grade students, and their scores as eighth-graders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The increase in students taking the test (they were all coming to class because of the curriculum!), and the amount of students who met or exceeded a higher standard was very satisfying, and I had fun teaching the unit, and the kids really valued the time we spent and professed learnin<\/strong>g. The unit was not easy, but the students had something interesting and more concrete to apply the concepts I want them to learn. Remember,\u00a0I built my games unit on the standards<\/strong> and my background in reading comprehension made games an easy connection \u2014 games are another narrative with all the same literary elements and genre patterns. They were basically doing a technical writing assignment in the form of a multimedia book report<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The bottom line, they surpassed expectations on the more difficult MCA2 test. We were expected to go down 12%.<\/p>\n

Key Factors:<\/p>\n