Adolescent Thinking and Online Writing After the Use of Commercial Games in the Classroom

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
A single-case ethnographic study of 18 students across 10 sessions in a bilingual Madrid secondary school class (2009/2010) used the commercial game Spore to teach evolutionary theory, so its findings rest on small-scale qualitative evidence.
02
Students initially held superficial understandings of theories associated with Darwin, Lamarck, Kimura, and Gould, and classroom discussion alone did little to deepen them.
03
An online forum generating 33 contributions prompted more substantive reasoning than oral discussion, with written, forum-based exchange producing more questions, reasoning, and well-developed arguments.
04
One student revised his views after recognizing the game's limitations, such as its compression of millions of years of evolution into hours of play, showing how critically evaluating a model can advance conceptual understanding.
05
The teacher's purposeful, sequenced questioning was decisive, helping students become aware of their own reasoning strategies.
06
The authors claim that learning to argue fosters metacognition and tolerance, and that commercial games can support digital literacies and research skills when reflection extends beyond the classroom.
07
The authors explicitly call for further research to test whether the findings generalize across schools, subjects, and student populations.

Summary

This study examines whether the commercial video game Spore can support adolescent reasoning when integrated into a high school curriculum. Grounded in situated cognition, Gee's semiotic domains, and Kuhn's work on inquiry and argumentation, the authors position the game as a vehicle for developing new literacies and reflective thinking. The research uses an ethnographic design in a bilingual secondary school class in Madrid during the 2009/2010 academic year, involving 18 students across 10 sessions in which the teacher used Spore to discuss evolutionary theory.

The findings indicate that students initially held superficial understandings of theories associated with Darwin, Lamarck, Kimura, and Gould. Classroom discussion alone did little to deepen this understanding, but an online forum generating 33 contributions prompted more substantive reasoning. One student revised his views after recognizing the game's limitations, such as its compression of millions of years of evolution into hours of play, illustrating how critical evaluation of a model can advance conceptual understanding. Throughout the study, the teacher's guidance proved decisive, particularly through purposeful, sequenced questioning that helped students become aware of their own reasoning strategies.

Among the study's most notable conclusions is that written, forum-based discussion generated more questions, reasoning, and well-developed arguments than oral dialogue. The authors also contend that learning to argue fosters metacognition and tolerance, and that commercial games can support digital literacies and research skills when reflection extends beyond the classroom. These claims rest on qualitative discourse analysis of a single small-scale case, and the authors explicitly call for further research to determine how well the findings generalize across schools, subjects, and student populations.