Abstract:

MISSING MONTY is game-based learning environment to improve 5th graders’ comprehension-monitoring skills and science content knowledge using informational texts. The program, funded by the National Science Foundation, promotes self-regulated learning and will include three key curricular units (ecosystems, Earth and human activity, from molecules to organisms) that align with Next Generation Science Standards. In MISSING MONTY the player fills the role of a promising young science professor traveling to work with Monty, a monitor lizard and world-renowned scientist known for his ability to solve real-life problems. Monty has created Wildlife University (WU) in a remote rainforest. The students and professors at WU are animals of many different types focused on becoming more scientifically literate in order to save their natural habitats. Unfortunately, upon arrival at WU the player realizes that 1) Monty has gone missing and 2) WU has been recently closed due to animals getting sick. Thus, the player is provided with the challenge of undertaking a series of missions in order to save Monty to determine the cause of the sickness.

Before the first mission, players will start with a ‘training camp’ led by the support-team professors to develop skills for highlighting, summarization, monitoring, and multiple-source comprehension. Students will be trained to selectively highlight for main ideas to encourage a focus on quality, self-regulated highlighting, self-assessment, and revision (Leopold & Leutner, 2015). Summarization was also chosen to focus the player on succinctly recognizing and conveying the main idea of a text. Summarization has been shown to lead to improved comprehension monitoring accuracy (Thiede & Anderson, 2003). Monitoring accuracy will be the third strategy of focus and will be assessed as students’ ability to calibrate their judgments of confidence with their actual performance on science items. Calibration as an index of metacognitive monitoring has been shown to relate strongly with academic performance and even predict efficiency in game-based learning contexts (Nietfeld, et al., 2014). Finally, will be required to find connections between texts or texts and visual displays (multiple-source comprehension).

Players then visit a number of different animal scientists in their natural environment and complete missions by applying the skills introduced during the training camp. The missions represent research camps in the rainforest, ocean, and savanna and are each comprised of a series of mini-games clustered by content-related texts and led by character researchers. Characters will present texts representing their research that vary both in length and structure as some will be topical and informative and others showing results from ongoing research that require interpretation of data, charts, and graphs. The focus of the current presentation will be to describe the iterative, design-based approach being taken to build and test MISSING MONTY. This includes a description of feasibility studies with students, passage development and validation, work with a Lead Teacher Cadre, a classroom integration study, and experiments to test the effectiveness of comprehension-monitoring tools and adaptive in-game scaffolds.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, self-regulated learning, literacy, science, metacognition.