From Newb to 1337: Expertise and the Learning Experience

A few nights ago, my learning theory class found itself on a brief tangent about the famous psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, known not only for his tremendous work as a researcher, but also for collecting the majority of his data from psychological experiments he conducted on himself (which, for obvious reasons, would probably cause your department head to laugh you out of the psych lab by today’s standards). I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that Ebbinghaus’s strategy is more or less the same thing I’m now doing with my World of Schoolcraft project, except (to complicate matters) I already have a boatload of prior experience with the work I’m doing, thus making me a confound within a confound within a confound.

                      

Who knew I'd end up sharing so much in common with a guy who had a beard this rad?

The reason I bring this up is because I've finally started tanking dungeons now that Sententiosus has passed level 15, and, in doing so, I’ve realized that a major conflict in assessing my learning is that I’ve long-since moved beyond what could be considered a novice in the field of gaming. I briefly touched on this during my entry on levels 1 – 5, but because I have so much prior knowledge about games and, more specifically, World of Warcraft, I can’t provide a terribly accurate account of what it’s like to learn from the perspective of a complete “newb." To anyone unfamiliar with the field of educational psychology, we call anyone who cannot see inconsistencies, trends, and information in a given situation a novice and any one who can an expert; in a classroom environment, this might include a master teacher recognizing chatty student groups as being off-task and requiring intervention while an amateur teacher assumes those same groups, because the students are talking to one another, are on task and the project is going well (an especially common misperception by new educators). This expert-novice dichotomy may be best explained if you consider any task in which you could be considered an expert (from skydiving to tying your shoes) and assess how the following fit into your ability to react to novel problems involving that task (borrowed from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School):

1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts of propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.
4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

If you can successfully connect a skill you possess with the above points, I'm sure you can understand how my prior knowledge in the gaming “subject area” has produced an inescapable, underlying impact on my ability to play as a “new” warrior. My six-year, on-and-off again relationship with World of Warcraft has long-since taught me how to recognize patterns of information that would not be recognized by novices (like how to rapidly change my attack strategy when fighting two enemies instead of one) and readily recall gaming experiences that would help me overcome seemingly novel challenges (like protecting my allies in combat). Even though I did not play the warrior class through my WoW learning process, the hours I spent raiding as a warlock and death knight from 2005 through 2009 afforded me many, many opportunities to hone my tanking skills by protecting my "guildies" in combat (often against much more challenging enemies than those Sententiosus is facing at level 20). As a result, I already have a basic understanding of the most fundamental skills and priorities necessary to be an “expert” tank: how to generate threat and keep enemies attacking me instead of my peers, how to group enemies together so my peers can maximize damage, how to use my special abilities like Shield Block to make healing me significantly easier, and how to generate the most damage output while serving my primary purpose of maintaining enemy attention.

No one said our guild logo was emotionally sensitive to those affected by the explosion of the Death Star.

A novice learner would not inherently possess such skills and would much more likely fumble his or her way through half of the game before developing an expert foundation onto which he or she could construct a better understanding of what to do and how to do it. This could, in essence, make or break the player’s ability to successfully navigate content with his or her peers, especially when faced with sudden increases in content difficulty.

                                                                                                                  

For example:

Three days ago, while running through the Wailing Caverns (a dungeon on the Kalimdor continent), my group and I found ourselves in a room with several magic-casting enemies scattered about in a semi-circle. When, in the midst of combat, our party’s warlock feared one of the magic-casting enemies, the mob’s frantic running alerted all twelve of the enemies in the room to our presence, leaving our party with nigh insurmountable odds of survival. Because our healer was ill-prepared for the massive onslaught, she was unable to keep me alive for more than a few seconds, which was barely enough time for me to get the rampaging magic casters under control; I promptly died when I became overrun, leaving the rest of the party to fend for themselves. However, because the healer was a WoW “expert,” she successfully resurrected me in the midst of battle, thus allowing me (as an “expert” tank) to immediately jump back into combat, begin taunting the enemies off of my companions, and help reorganize our battle strategy to save us from a wipe.

Expert knowledge ensured our survival in the bowels of the Wailing Caverns.

Generally speaking, this is not at all how a novice group of learners would or could react under the same conditions; a less-experienced party would most certainly wipe and learn (through the trial and error process) that fearing an enemy magic caster in a crowded room is not a preferable, or safe, option.⁽¹⁾ Had the healer and I not been experts in our respective fields, our group very likely would have taken a much, much longer time to finish the dungeon since we would not have had nearly the stream-lined efficiency of chain-pulling enemies (fighting one after another with little to no break) and would, in all likelihood, have faced many more situations where too many enemies were drawn into combat at once. One could safely assume that our combined expert familiarity with the game (and games in general) saved us a lot of time, energy, and headache in completing what we saw to be a minor exercise in a field we already understood.

For this reason, some of my friends and family have suggested that I conduct this experiment with a game I have no familiarity with (perhaps something like Star Trek Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, or EVE Online); however, I've come to believe that even with different titles, graphics, and quests, my expert familiarity with WoW would ultimately taint any attempt for me to learn and master another MMORPG because, at their basest level, all MMORPGs are constructed with the same framework.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I toyed with the idea of blogging about game-based learning midway through the summer when I played around with a 10-day trial of Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) at the behest of my colleague, Roger Travis. It didn't take long before I found that I was less enamored with the game's narrative than Roger and his Fellowship (meaning that I had no real desire to continue playing), but (rapidly waning interest aside) I quickly recognized  and latched onto the game’s World of Warcraft-like gameplay elements (making me more acutely aware of my expertise with MMORPGs in general). Even though the character class I chose (Runecaster) was vastly different than any I had used in my WoW days, it took me only a few minutes to translate my expert WoW skills into a language appropriate for LOTRO.

I think the same is essentially true of the way students translate their experiences from one class to another in school: after taking more than one math class, they come to  expect the same kinds of lectures, homework problems, and tests that they’ve seen a hundred times before, even if the content differs from algebra to geometry to calculus. While my experience with LOTRO was nothing to write home about, it did make me wonder whether or not my ability to translate one game's skills to another meant something about how games can affect expert learning in the long-run. If that’s the way schools already work, why don't more students seem to have as much success at shifting their attention from one class to another as gamers do between games? Would “expert” ability in a game-like course transcend the gaming elements and improve a student’s ability to think and answer questions with greater speed and precision in all disciplines? ⁽²⁾

What are the odds that Ferris Bueller found the things he learned in school to be dynamic and applicable across all academic disciplines?

A lack of engaging elements in the courses we teach, or any way for our students to see the relevance of one class to the next, makes it impossible for kids to cognitively switch between biology  and English the same way an expert LOTRO or WoW player cognitively switches between MMORPGs. Consider the way standardized testing has compartmentalized subject matter: math is taught to be exclusively math-y, science science-y, and English English-y, all because government mandated teaching objectives focus on having students meander through the rote memorization of isolated facts rather than adequately spending time on broad conceptual thinking skills. With respect to the CAPT, the transferable skills of scientific observation, persuasive writing, and logical problem solving  are only minimally overlapped in any meaningful way, which discourages students from thinking about their courses as being multi-lateral and dynamic. As a result, we generally do not challenge students to use math skills in their English classes or science skills in their history classes because it's seen as too much of a burden compared to what standardized tests are actually testing.⁽³⁾

In order to overcome this struggle, school districts might consider encouraging pedagogical deviations from the norm that make courses more interdisciplinary (thereby encouraging students to develop more practicable and valuable academic expertise). For instance, a chemistry teacher could develop a class taught with an overarching, MMORPG-like narrative that shapes learning such that becoming an expert at the “game” is equivalent to becoming an expert at mastering laboratory procedures, balancing equations, and analyzing data (which would inevitably improve how students recognize patterns, trends, and problem solutions). Borrowing from World of Warcraft's soon-to-be released Archaeology profession, the students could go on an "expedition" during class to find examples of a given phenomena (ionic bonding, perhaps), log their findings in a journal (which chemicals ionically bond and why they do so), and use their learning to piece together a more complex puzzle (a laboratory experiment) in order to receive a chemistry "artifact" (a chemistry-related prize for successfully completing the lab). Through this lens, the students would be prompted to view the research-observation-experimentation process as a mystery in need of solving instead of just another isolated event in their academic lives, thus forging an element of engagement that supersedes the scariness of chemistry-based math.

Students could keep a log book that includes several categories of chemical phenomena, all of which could be tied to course objectives.

As students uncover new information and add it to their journals, they can refer back to it in order to help them with laboratory experiments focusing on the categories listed in their logs.

Soon, the daunting periodic table becomes a useful mystery-solving tool instead of a boring, uninspiring compilation of numbers and letters.

Though this example is simple, increasing student engagement by using the periodic table in conjunction with dynamic problem-solving also increases the likelihood that students will foster a cross-subject area expertise not dissimilar from that which I used to transfer my MMORPG skills from WoW to LOTRO (particularly in the form of scientific observation and critical thinking). The addition of a game-based layer, as I've argued before, paints the content such that it becomes relevant to disenchanted and already successful students, invariably turning the task of learning something difficult into learning something fun and useful. The expertise developed through logical problem solving can then be transferred to other subject areas, making the process of using a tool like the periodic table seem helpful in untangling all kinds of puzzles.

I can understand how expert familiarity in a game like WoW may seem useless in a non-game context, but when the same degree of critical thinking (for instance, the healer and I working in tandem to salvage our near-wipe) is applied to constructivist assessments in a mathematics, science, and other classes, it becomes much easier to see the value in creating novel problems that bridge all subjects and encourage interdisciplinary, longitudinal thinking. World of Schoolcraft may not be considered scientifically valid given my previous familiarity and expertise with the MMORPG genre, but it's certainly worth evaluating how a gamer's familiarity and expertise with games could be valuable in a classroom setting. If we can get Johnny and Sally interested in knowing why some elements are more electronegative than others by giving them cool mysteries to solve,  I think we'll be much closer to achieving our goal of cultivating more expert, life-long learners.

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(1)   Incidentally, the novice warlock in our group indirectly received positive reinforcement when all of this happened; we survived the mess he caused and everyone spent a few moments congratulating one another on doing such a good job (thereby conditioning the warlock to think that the same poor gameplay will be acceptable in the future). For the safety of other players, it may have been educationally more valuable if someone had reprimanded him instead!

(2)   A recent study indicates that this is biologically possible. A research group tested several dozen 18 – 25 year old non-gamers and tracked each participant’s ability to problem-solve after playing fast-paced games (Call of Duty) or slow-paced games (The Sims 2) for a number of hours. Gamers who participated in fast-paced, group-oriented games were able to come to faster conclusions with accuracy matching their peers’ because they had increased the efficiency of their auditory and visual information collection processes over the course of playing the game (Green, Pouget, & Bavelier, 2010).

(3)   I'm not advocating that English educators start teaching their courses in terms of addition and subtraction for the sake of using math outside a math course, but instead encouraging them to find ways for students to analyze course content from different, interdisciplinary perspectives (i.e. "After reading Act III, Scene II, how was Hamlet's forensic investigation similar to something you've seen in a movie or television show about criminal investigation? Was his investigation scientifically sound enough for him to reasonably assume Claudius's guilt? Why or why not?"). Teachers need not do this continuously (for obvious reasons), but it would go a long way in prompting multi-lateral student thinking that will lead to much more widely applicable academic expertise.

Works Cited

 

Bransford, J. (Ed.). (1999). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Retrieved September 14, 2010, from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160

Green, C., Pouget, A., Bavelier, D. (2010). Improved probabilistic inference as a general learning mechanism with action video games. Current Biology, 2010; 20 (17): 1573-1579 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.07.040