The project will generate evidence that is descriptive [case study, telemetric analyses, natural language processing, discourse analyses]. Original data are being collected on 7th and 8th graders using assessments of learning, observation [personal observation, videography, Web logs], survey research [self-completion questionnaire, semi-structured or informal interview, focus groups], and other sources including telemetric data exhaust from game technology, online forum posts, and face-to-face interaction. Instruments or measures being used include diagrams of cellular structures and functions, pre/posttests of knowledge comprehension, and gameplay levels.
In addition to basic pre/post assessments of learning, we will combine three forms of analysis of the data and look for patterns of relationship across them: (1) educational data mining and learning analytics on telemetric data from the game platform, (2) discourse analysis and human coding of online and face-to-face discourse data, (3) natural language processing of online and face-to-face discourse data.
