Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds |
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| Authors: | Constance Steinkuehler and Sean Duncan |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA |
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| Abstract: | In today’s increasingly “flat” world of globalization (Friedman 2005), the need for a scientifically literate citizenry has grown more urgent. Yet, by some measures, we have done a poor job
at fostering scientific habits of mind in schools. Recent research on informal games-based learning indicates that such technologies and the communities they evoke
may be one viable alternative—not as a substitute for teachers and classrooms, but as an alternative to textbooks and science
labs. This paper presents empirical evidence about the potential of games for fostering scientific habits of mind. In particular,
we examine the scientific habits of mind and dispositions that characterize online discussion forums of the massively multiplayer
online game World of Warcraft. Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in “social knowledge construction” rather than social banter.
Over half of the posts evidenced systems based reasoning, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an
evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument. |
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| Keywords: | Informal science reasoning Virtual worlds Social knowledge construction Game-based learning Informal learning |
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