Building Bridges: Teachers Leveraging Game-Based Implicit Science Learning in Physics Classrooms

Elizabeth Rowe, Erin Bardar, Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Christina Shane-Simpson, and Su-Jen Roberts
Handbook of Research on Gaming Trends in P-12 Education, IGI Global/Hershey, PA

Summary

This chapter describes the analysis of 729 daily teacher logs from a 2013-14 national classroom implementation study with hundreds of high school physics students using the game, Impulse, finding classrooms using materials to bridge implicit and explicit science learning performed significantly better than control classrooms (Rowe et al., 2014). This effect was moderated by whether or not the class was a Honors/AP class. The authors examine the student and teacher demographics, science content, instructional materials and methods, and game-based pedagogies as potential explanations for those findings. The largest difference among Honors/AP vs. non-Honors/AP classrooms using any Bridge activities was their use of formal, teacher-led discussion.