Anders Bouwer (andersb@dai.ed.ac.uk)
Tue, 04 Aug 1998 17:09:19 +0100
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Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 17:09:19 +0100 From: Anders Bouwer <andersb@dai.ed.ac.uk> Subject: [ifets] direct, relevant, evaluative feedback
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To reply to Ashok Patel's concerns about the possible
benefits and caveats of competitive game settings,
I'd like to share my thoughts on this.
To summarise some of the benefits of games:
(in addition to Scott Overmeyer's points made earlier)
The high degree of interactivity in (computer) games
essentially means that many of your actions as a
player result in a direct response (of the computer
or another human player) on a very short timescale, which
can be seen as evaluative (often comparative) feedback in
the context of the goal of the game, while you still have
plenty of options to improve your performance before
the game ends. I feel that it is this interactivity
which creates a sense of involvement and achievement
which makes people want to play games.
To summarise some needs in current educational settings:
Current practice in high school and university education
(as I experienced it myself) often deflects from this
idea of giving relevant, direct feedback in time to allow
students to improve their performance. Often, there is
not much opportunity for personalized evaluation before
the formal examination. And even then, the feedback often
consists only of giving grades a few days or even weeks
later without much explanation, which is not very
interactive at all. And although grades are evaluative,
my personal experience in giving grades shows that people
having the same grade often have completely different
good and bad parts in their work, so I think grades are
not even very good as a comparative measure either.
My experience as a student assistant is that not many
people come back to ask for an explanation about their
grade (mainly those who failed), but those who do seem
to learn a lot during such a session. I always think
that there should have been an opportunity like that
before their examination.
But this may boil down to a motivation problem I think
many of you will recognize, at least in high schools
and universities:
Students won't work until they have to do something
which will be formally assessed, and by then
it's already too late for feedback to be useful.
About Ashok Patel's concern about the possible lack
of reflection, I agree that high-speed performance
is not a very good measure, except in some cases
where you want to teach procedural skills.
However, this is a distinct issue from the competitive
one, because in a game like chess, reflection is
of course very important.
I think communication with a competitor (e.g. think
of a adversary discussion partner when discussing a
controversial issue) allows more opportunities for
reflection than doing a task on your own.
So, I agree with the statement mentioned earlier (forgot
by whom) in the discussion that ITS should be thought
of as dialogue systems, or at least dialogue supporting
systems, capable of giving adequate feedback, allowing
interaction in time to be useful.
But as a final comment: we shouldn't forget that not
everybody likes playing (computer) games.
Ashok Patel wrote:
>
> ...
> As some participants in the discussion have already noted,
> any thing can be made a 'game' by those who play it.
> I would like, however, to share some of my concerns:
>
> 1. When you are playing a competitive game as mentioned
> above, do you put enough time and effort in reflection ?
>
... cut out more interesting points which I'm not commenting on
currently.
-- Anders Bouwer (e-mail: andersb@dai.ed.ac.uk) Department of Artificial Intelligence, The University of Edinburgh
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