Games and Learning

Deep within the multinational corporation Pearson, the research and innovation team is envisioning a radically different world in the classroom.

“Games have the potential to be assessment without the test,” said Kristen DiCerbo, director of eLearning at the Pearson Research & Innovation Network. The Network is the educational publishing giant’s R&D arm that seeks to test out the next wave of ideas that will inform the next generation of Pearson products sold to schools.

She admitted it is “a radical idea” but it is one she believes in and with her background in the data and assessment tools out there, she thinks she has that potential to make it happen.

It may seem like a particularly strange idea coming from Pearson, the British company that has drawn attention, almost all of it negative, for its role in standardized testing.

Pearson has drawn fire from everyone from John Oliver to teachers unions for turning the nation’s troubled efforts to assess student performance through regular testing into a huge profit center for the company.

One lengthy article that blasted the company for its role in Texas’ education reform highlights the main criticism — “Pearson is part of a larger education-reform effort that seeks to improve public education through free-market principles. Often that means non-traditional educational approaches like charter schools and online learning. The movement includes a lot of earnest folks, eager to improve public schools and do what’s best for kids. But their efforts have earned a fortune for companies like Pearson.”

Pearson’s role is somewhat unique in the modern American school, serving as a major supplier for both content like textbooks and also running many state testing services. The company even runs teacher training efforts in some states.

Some critics of Pearson have stressed its size only helps if the company is actually working for the benefit of the teacher in the classroom.

“All service providers need to help teachers produce student outcomes in an era when the product is as accountable as the humans,” said Eileen Murphy Buckley, founder and CEO of ThinkCERCA, a school-wide, online educational resource, when asked about Pearson and games. “Any scale anyone enjoys today will be diminished if the outcomes are not there, so to play any role in the business of ed tech, companies need to focus on what helps students learn best.”

DiCerbo countered that is exactly the approach her division is taking with games.

“As a company Pearson has taken it as a company and said let’s see on the research side demonstrate how we can do that and then pull from the research into the product space,” she said, adding she believes it is a “good strategy.”

“Let’s not just dive into this without really understanding how to do it.”

That approach has lead DiCerbo’s lab to study the way data can be gathered and assessed from a game by building games inside the company and with external partners to actually test the concept.

One game the company and DiCerbo worked on was SimCity EDU, the Glasslab Games project that launched two years ago and contained some of the most aggressive and forward-thinking data assessments ever tried with a game.

That team also paired up with independent game designer Chris Crowell to build a smaller game – Alice in Arealand – to plug more directly into a complete Pearson curriculum.

Pearson, Glasslab Games and independent game designer Chris Crowell worked on Alice in Arealand to test concepts behind teaching and assessing geometry skills.

Crowell lavished praise on Pearson for bringing so much knowledge of the classroom into the project without sacrificing or dictating the game design.

“I have worked with a number of large brands, NASCAR and Indiana Jones for example, and sometimes the project can unveil differing goals on the parts of the stakeholders, so playing well with others is not a given,” he told gamesandlearning.org about the project.

I was given tremendous freedom and support to try new ideas. Alice was possibly the most collaborative and mutually respectful projects I have ever been part of.

— Chris Crowell, independent game designer

DiCerbo said the Alice project is an example of why sometimes bigger is better.

“When you are a company of our size you have the benefit of different people with specific skill sets being available to come together on a project,” she said. “You can have someone who is really good at understanding geometric learning and someone who can understand assessment and data and a lot of the people who are hear have been teachers or are in touch with teachers asking them what they need and where the pressure points are.”

She also said bringing in people like Crowell help the company learn to be more agile and also not fall into the trap of trying to have educators make video games.

Although the project itself was collaborative, both Pearson and Crowell understood the game was only part of the end product. Even more importantly, Alice in Arealand is a tool for gathering what he called “big data” that could be used for education.

“The general sense we had on our Alice team was that the technology would be a great assistance to teachers not only by creating more engaging ways to interact with the curriculum, but by gathering play metrics that could be turned into reports that help pinpoint individual strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “In the case of the play metrics, all of us were very keen to see how the players evolved their understanding of the concepts as they played, failed, tried again and again until they created their own success.”

DiCerbo agreed that is where she wants the work of the Pearson Lab to go.

“The … place we have seen games generally moving is the idea of going deep into a concept to really understand that piece and how do we do that in a way that really gets at that deep understanding and is fun and lets us collect data that tells us about where students are,” DiCerbo said. “That’s the place we’re trying to get to.”

So why would Pearson, a corporation that makes millions administering tests in different states, support a project that may make those tests a thing of the past?

Part of it may have to do with the highly controversial nature of standardized tests themselves.

Last year, teachers in some districts protested the tests that were administered by Pearson and others criticizing the content as well as state department of education rules to prevented teachers and administrators from discussing the content of the tests.

“I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them,” Elizabeth Phillips wrote in The New York Times last year.

She added, “It is frightening to think what ‘teaching to the test’ would mean, given the nature of the test.”

As the stakes around testing have become so much higher, the tests themselves have become lightening rods of criticism. Games may offer a route for the educational publisher to create a new product for school that could assess learning in a less controversial and pressure-filled single assessment.

And although Pearson has faced criticism due to its size and the fact it has effectively become a one-stop show for teaching and assessing both students and teachers, DiCerbo sees this as the strength of the firm in helping games have a far bigger impact on education.

We have really cool games and so do other developers, but they are off by themselves. It’s up to the teacher to figure out how do I fit this in on top of everything else I am doing and something I am really excited about is thinking about the whole system of the classroom and how does this fit into the overall curricular unit.

— Kristen DiCerbo, Director Pearson eLearning

She admitted the company is not quick to change and neither are schools, but by building games into the system of education Pearson produces, she argued the company is better positioned to make real change happen in education.

“I think you need the size of an organization like Pearson to implement the kind of change games could bring to the classroom,” she said. “Changing the way people think, but that is not a small task when you are talking about something as big and complex as education.”