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Draft 1 argumentative essay

Parents and instructors are concerned about digital game based learning as a distraction
instead of a standard learning tool.
While e-learning has been on the rise in industry and educational institutions for the past
few years, it has also been attracting a lot of criticism due to a number of current limitations.
Since learning is the result of rich and varied activities, many current e-learning environments
propose passive educational models based on storing content that is distributed or consumed
rather than learnt and where the current knowledge in the field of pedagogy gets scarce attention.
Parents and teachers have doubt in whether students are actually benefiting the students
rather than distracting them from their studies. They are unsure of whether the effort put into
using the games is worth the end result. Dr. Heather Coffey, from The UNC School of Education
states, "games may be more distracting than a typical learning tool and that the goals of the
games do not necessarily always align with the learning goals of the classroom." (Coffey).There
is an idea that students aren't actually learning anything, they are only wasting their time and
playing games rather than becoming educated. Parents and educators fear that technology can
actually undermine learning processes, while at the same time absorbing resources and funding
for education. Other concerns are that DGBL can dilute learning discipline and teaches students
that learning does not require perseverance, critical reading, semiotic connections and
collaborative peer learning maybe redundant. In other words, "in addition to teaching the
curriculum, technology has an unintended effect of discouraging serious learning" (Okan, 2003).
Many criticize todays learning games, and there is much to criticize. But some of these
games dont produce learning. It is not because they are games, or because the concept of the
game-based learning is faulty. Its is because those particular games are badly designed.

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Draft 1 argumentative essay

The real measure of learning is behaviour change would this individual, when faced
with an identical or similar problem in the future, do something (mentally or physically) from
before? Because we can never know this until it happens, the proxy that we typically use to
measure learning is the test: a series of questions, problems, and hypotheticals that let the learner
demonstrate, although in somewhat artificial context, the new behaviours and approaches they
have learned. So what people really want to know is: are the tests scores the same as with the
other methods of learning? Although there have only been few comparisons between digital
game based learning and alternatives conducted this way, the studies that have been done show
that learning games that are well designed produce learning while engaging learners.
The Lightspan Partnership, now part of Plato Learning, which created PlayStation games
for curricular reinforcement in elementary school, measured that when one strips out the
recesses, lunch and in-between break times, a typical 9-3 school day actually consists of about
three hours of instruction time. If kids get to play their games six hours over a weekend, and the
games were only 50 percent educational, they had effectively add a day in a week in their
schooling. This would yield, as they hoped, to higher test scores of the students. Lightspan
conducted studies in over four hundred individual school districts and performed a meta-analysis
of all of them. They found increase in vocabulary and language arts of 24 to 25 percent
respectively over the control groups and math problem solving and math procedures and
algorithms scores were 51 and 30 percent higher.
/*Conclusion*/

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Draft 1 argumentative essay

References:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563208000617
https://sites.google.com/a/cortland.edu/researchproject2/disadvantages
http://digital-game-based-learning.wikia.com/wiki/Negative_Effects_of_Games
http://www.csulb.edu/~arezaei/ETEC444/discussion/edutainment.pdf