[The partial excerpt below is part of Dede's chapter Developing a Research Agenda for Educational Games and Simulations in the book Computer Games and Instruction, published in 2011 by Information Age Publishing and comes courtesy of SharpBrains].
MPICT recently participated (6/22-6/25/11) in NSF's Synergy conference on scaling Advanced Technology Education (ATE) centers. MPICT is a regional ATE center focused on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for community colleges.
Chris Dede of Harvard's Graduate School of Education has some relevant thoughts on scalability:
"Scale is not purely a matter of economic common sense, such as not spending large amounts of resources on students in each classroom having access to a game development company to build what they design, or simulations that involve high ratios of instructors to learners. Research has documented that in education, unlike other sectors of society, the scaling of successful instructional programs from a few settings to widespread use across a range of contexts is very difficult even for innovations that are economically and logistically practical (Dede, Honan, & Peters, 2005).
In fact, research findings typically show substantial influence of contextual variables (e.g., the teacher’s content preparation, students’ self-efficacy, prior academic achievement) in shaping the desirability, practicality, and effectiveness of educational interventions (Barab & Luehmann, 2003; Schneider & McDonald, 2007). Therefore, achieving scale in education requires designs that can flexibly adapt to effective use in a wide variety of contexts across a spectrum of learners and teachers. Clarke and Dede (2009) document the application of a five-dimensional framework for scaling up to the implementation of the River City multi-user virtual environment for middle school science:
Depth: evaluation and design-based research to understand and enhance causes of effectiveness
Sustainability: “robust design” to enable adapting to inhospitable contexts
Spread: modifying to retain effectiveness while reducing resources and expertise required
Shift: moving beyond “brand” to support users as co-evaluators, co-designers, and co-scalers
Evolution: learning from users’ adaptations to rethink the innovation’s design model
This is not to argue that research agendas should not include studies of unscalable interventions – such research can aid with design and help evolve theory – but I believe that the bulk of a research agenda, to produce usable knowledge, should focus on innovations that can scale. As the research review by Tobias et al (this volume) documents, educational games and simulations in general offer desirable affordances for implementation at scale.
I offer these assumptions not as “truths,” but as propositions to be debated in the course of formulating a research agenda for educational gaming and simulation. Others may wish to modify assumptions, to add assumptions to this list, or even to argue that a research agenda should not make any assumptions about what constitutes quality. My point is that any attempt to develop a research agenda should make its underlying beliefs and values explicit, because these are central to determining its conceptual framework."
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