Collaborative 3D learning games for future learning: teachers’ instructional practices to enhance shared knowledge construction among students

Abstract

Collaborative games will enable new kinds of possibilities for learning. In the future, the goal of game-based learning should be to introduce new ideas and deepen learners’ in-depth understanding. However, studies have shown that shared high-level knowledge construction is a challenging process. Moreover, thus far, few empirical studies have examined what constitutes the teacher’s role in games. The focus of this paper is to investigate teachers’ real-time instructional activities in a scripted 3D game setting. The authors’ hypothesis is that groups with real-time teacher instruction will come up with more shared knowledge construction that can be considered productive than groups studying without real-time teacher instruction. Thus, content analysis was conducted to compare collaboration processes between different learning conditions. This study indicates that the teacher has a special role in empowering collaborative knowledge construction in the 3D game context in vocational education. The authors’ findings show that the teacher’s participation in collaborative work helps groups to develop productive ways of providing knowledge and asking contextual questions. In addition, they illustrate the teacher’s ability to involve students in formulating hypotheses, interpreting context, providing explanations and describing observations.

Keywords:

• serious games
• collaborative learning
• teachers’ instructional activity
• CSCL

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Academy of Finland (Project no. 258659). The development of the 3D environment was supported by the EU Structural Funds and nationally by the State Provincial Office of Western Finland from the administrative sector of the Ministry of Education. Special thanks to Birgitta Mannila, Ludocraft Ltd and Jyväskylä College.

Notes

1. This article is in line with the notion of Arvaja, Salovaara, Häkkinen, and Järvelä (2007), according to whom collaboration is defined as a shared knowledge construction in which it is not enough that participants cumulatively share knowledge together (Mercer, 1996), but where the knowledge construction needs to be jointly built on others’ ideas and thoughts (Mercer, 2010). (For more detailed information see Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011).

2. The development of the Gamebridge game is a joint effort among three parties, the Finnish Institute for Educational Research at the University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä College, and LudoCraft Ltd.

3. Transcripts were coded independently by both authors and one trained coder. To determine the level of correspondence among these three coders, the reliability coefficient Krippendorff’s alpha was calculated. Krippendorff’s alpha (a) inter-rater reliability coefficients were a = 0.949 for six theory-based main categories and a = 0.943 for data-driven subcategories. Both values were situated within the classification of high reliability (a .800) (Krippendorff, 2004, p. 241; Lombard, Snyder-Duch, & Bracken, 2002). However, it has to be noted that strong agreement is influenced by joint meetings during the coding process and the fact that two of the coders (authors) have several years’ background in developing this method to analyse collaborative knowledge construction in 3D game settings.