Metagaming Assessment: A Playful, Critical Approach to Teaching Teachers about Digital Assessment
Concurrent Session 4
Brief Abstract
This session describes the main project of an online course on digital assessment, which tasks students (most of whom are educators) with applying the videogame studies concept of metagaming to their assessment practices. In doing so, it challenges attendees to engage in similar activities in their own educational contexts.
Extended Abstract
Overview
Across literature about educational assessment (whether academic research, practitioner guidelines, journalism, or otherwise), there is a constant and under-examined refrain: the notion that grades function as games. This appears in statements, for instance, that students “treat school as a game” whose goal is to build the highest GPA; or that students learn to “game” or “play the system” to ensure that they get the grades that they desire; or that teachers are “setting up rules to a game” when they design assignments in anticipation of grading them. These and other characterizations of education, learning, and assessment as games are concomitant with the rise of a strain of popular advocacy that has encouraged educators to gamify their classes. Gamification refers, specifically, to the application of videogame-like features–such as the rewarding of scores, badges, and rankings on competitive leaderboards for educational assessment purposes–to non-game settings. Proponents of educational gamification have advised that gamification can create engaging learning environments by harnessing the enthralling powers of videogames to motivate and excite students, thereby improving the quality of their learning (e.g. Kapp, 2012). In contrast, critics have argued that gamification is an exploitative pursuit that fundamentally misunderstands videogames’ unique qualities (e.g. Bogost, 2011), that is overly reliant on extrinsic motivation (e.g. Conway, 2014), and that fails to teach appreciation for the underlying activities of learning and play (e.g. Klopfer et al., 2018). In the shadow of those rampant “grades are games” metaphors, contemplating the debates around educational gamification raises an important question: What is the purpose of gamifying educational settings when their assessment systems are already gamified?
In this Education Session, I describe how that question guided my design for an online, Masters-level course on Digital Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Students who take this course are, themselves, educators from myriad contexts who wish to enhance their assessment practices in online settings and via digital technologies. My goal with the course redesign was to cultivate educator-students’ critical literacies of and dispositions towards digital assessment practices, while also challenging them to examine the ways that prevailing American assessment practices (such as grades and standardized tests) are already gamified structures. Additionally–and in the spirit of longstanding calls to shift educational assessment cultures in ways that would facilitate enactments of democratic practices (e.g. Shepard, 2000)–I also wanted to prompt students to imagine possibilities for effecting change in their own professional contexts, even as they work within and against rigid institutional, technological, and socio-political structures. To do so, I built the course around a major creative assignment: the Metagaming Assessment Project.
The Metagaming Assessment Project applies the concept of metagaming from Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s (2017) book, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames, to an analysis of the already-gamified systems of educational assessment. Boluk and LeMieux define metagaming as “a critical practice in which playing, making, and thinking about videogames occur within the same act,” (p. 2). To elaborate on this idea, they explain that videogames now operate as the “ideological avatar of play” that has been “harnessed to gamify intellectual, informatics, and affective labor” (p. 6)–as well as, I would argue, formal education. Central to this critique is a distinction between game rules and videogame mechanics: game rules are “voluntary constraints and social contracts,” whereas videogame mechanics are “ontological operations” in which “players have no choice but to work within the limitations of these involuntary systems” (p. 8).
Mobilizing this differentiation between rules and mechanics, the Metagaming Assessment Project thus encourages educator-students to interrogate the systemic mechanics that dictate their assessment activities (such as the use of institutionally mandated digital tools) while also imagining the possibilities for socially and democratically negotiated assessment rules that would prioritize student learning. To prepare educator-students to undertake this analysis, the first part of the Digital Assessment course scaffolds the histories of prominent American assessment practices, the “electronification” of assessment, and the ideologies, policies, and assumptions about human learning that undergird these developments. Along the way, the course itself models possibilities for doing digital assessment that operationalize the takeaways from decades of educational research that has critiqued conventional structures of grading, standardization, quantification, and the glorification of individual achievement. The course is ungraded and features narrative feedback via various modalities (e.g., written, audiovisual); it is fundamentally social, including open discussions, peer-assessments, and opportunities for collaborative knowledge construction; and it is democratically oriented, necessitating students’ contributions to collective determinations of assessment parameters.
These lessons culminate in students’ assemblage of their own Metagaming Assessment Project during the final month of the course. The project tasks students with thinking simultaneously as game players and game designers and with connecting their creations to the concept of metagaming. It asks them: if assessment practices are already gamified, then how can we (individually and collectively) play with, redesign, break, or create new games about, within, around, and without the systems that over-determine our educational endeavors? In turn, this session poses these questions to attendees as well.
Session Goals and Outcomes
As an Education Session that addresses an audience of attendees from many different educational settings, the goals of this presentation mirror those of the course itself: to hone attendees’ critical perspectives of digital educational assessment. By sharing this playful approach to course design, this session also posits possible alternatives to dominant models of both assessment and gamification that account for critiques from educational researchers and game studies scholars. In this case, the Metagaming Assessment Project engages online students by inviting them to take on the roles of critical game designers and players in the ways that they approach their assessment practices; it, therefore, foregrounds and fosters the activities of learning, designing, and playing. Overall, then, this session also provides a further outcome of suggesting avenues through which game studies scholarship can support educators and instructional designers in rethinking classroom gamification, literacies of play, and approaches to educational assessment.
Audience Interaction
This Education Session is divided into a timeframe of: 25-minute presentation, 15-minute group discussion, and 5-minute question-and-answer. During the presentation, audience members (both onsite and virtual) will have access to a Google Jamboard that will include prompts for attendees to brainstorm and share their thoughts about the assessment rules and mechanics in their own contexts. It will also pose questions that parallel those outlined in the presentation for attendees to answer on their own. During the 15-minute group discussion, attendees will be invited to share about their contributions to the Jamboard. As a group, attendees and the author will then collaboratively speculate about possibilities for metagaming assessment based on these contributions.
References
Bogost, I. (2011). Gamification is bullshit. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/gamification-is-bullshit/243338/.
Boluk, S. and P. LeMieux. (2017). Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. University of Minnesota Press.
Conway, S. (2014). Zombification?: Gamification, motivation, and the user. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 6(2), pp. 129-141. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.6.2.129_1.
Kapp, K. M. (2012). The gamification of learning and instruction: Game-based methods and strategies for training and education. Pfeiffer.
Klopfer, E., J. Haas, S. Osterweil, and L. Rosenheck. (2018) Resonant games: Design principles for learning games that connect hearts, minds, and the everyday. MIT Press.
Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14.