Virtual Decisions

Digital Simulations for Teaching Reasoning in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Steve Cohen, Kent E. Portney, Dean Rehberger, Carolyn Thorsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135611880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Developments in digital technologies--and in understandings of how best to use them--have altered teaching and learning environments, and stand to do so even more rapidly in the future. Virtual Decisions: Digital Simulations for Teaching Reasoning in the Social Sciences and Humanities focuses on the special issues related to the use of digital technologies in teaching the complex nature of social decisions, with particular attention to the use of digital role-play simulations as a means to accomplish this. With the advent of new technologies for delivering multimedia simulations to students, and advanced graphics capabilities to create life-like decision environments, digital role-play simulations are increasingly available for K-12 and higher education teachers to use in the classroom. This book helps both users and developers make intelligent choices about the value added by using simulations, technology, and media to teach reasoning in social sciences and humanities classrooms.The book relies on a four-part framework for developing a digital multimedia-based simulation approach, which represents: a cross-disciplinary method to describing simulations; the students who are using them; the educational setting in which they are used; and a rubric for assessing learning. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part presents a review of the theory and research detailing why didactic approaches do not or cannot address specific learning goals, as well as a description of the theoretical framework for using and developing simulations. The second part includes chapters on specific digital simulations and how they fit with the theoretical framework. Virtual Decisions fills a significant gap in the existing literature of instructional technology and is of interest to instructors, primarily in the social sciences and humanities, who are potential users of the simulations. It is also a resource for graduate students and pre-service teachers studying simulation design.

I

Theoretical Frameworks

1

Practical Contexts and Theoretical Frameworks for Teaching Complexity with Digital Role-Play Simulations

Kent E.Portney

Tufts University

Steve Cohen

Tufts University

The world of instructional technology has altered the fabric of education over the last twenty years. Actual uses of instructional technology have not always lived up to their billing, often promising far more than they could ever deliver. Yet in recent years, the confluence of interest in the development and use of various kinds of role-play decision simulations with improvements in digital technologies has ushered in an era where simulations are finding their way into curricula and being used to address a wide array of teaching and learning challenges not previously possible. Advances in instructional technology have helped improve learning of advanced concepts in mathematics and statistics, and now advances in technology and learning theory are being applied to complex issues and concepts in the social and behavioral sciences and humanities. While instructional technology was once thought to be irrelevant to instruction of high-order concepts in the social sciences, this has changed. The development of various kinds of digital simulations has been a significant part of this change.

This volume is essentially about some of these changes. With this volume, our goal is to provide a foundation for understanding the uses of digital role-play decision simulations in curricula for the social and behavioral sciences. It provides documentation for some of the instructional contexts in which these simulations have been used, and introduces the theoretical foundations underlying their design and instructional use. The first three chapters of this volume provide an extensive overview of the background and foundational issues that apply broadly to the design and application of digital role-play decision simulations for understanding social decisions. It is part of the hypothesis put forward by this volume that the introduction of digital role play simulations into a carefully designed social science curriculum offers the potential for rethinking that it means to understand and research social decisions. Subsequent chapters present in-depth discussions of specific decision simulations that have been developed by social scientists and humanists, and used in research and instructional settings. The reader is left to consider whether simulation-based curricula proposed could improve how students and researchers think about social decisions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the conceptual and definitional underpinnings that establish the need for such simulations and related curricula.

Digital Role-Play Decision Simulations

The focus of this volume is on a specific kind of simulation, the digital role-play simulation. In the social sciences, whether in the context of research or instruction, the term simulation is often used to refer to a variety of techniques used to mimic some social, political, economic, or psychological process. Here the focus is on specific types of simulations, and it is important to be clear about what we mean by digital role-play simulations. The role-play element is key. In digital role-play simulations the student participates in the simulation rather than directing it. In contrast, other simulations allow the user–students to play “God”: users set parameters, start a simulation, and see what happens as events unfold over time.

While digital role-play decisions may be flexible, the flexibility is not in the hands of the student. The simulations discussed in this volume keep the control in hands of the instructor–mentor and require participation by the students. A student–user plays a crucial role by participating in the simulation and making one or more decisions that influence an outcome. The simulations may allow faculty and simulation administrators the flexibility to (systematically) modify the simulations and study how different contexts might influence decisions and student learning.

In many fields, analogous to case-based instruction and problem-based learning, role-play decision simulations have long been used as a legitimate instructional technique. Sometimes referred to as social process simulations, such techniques are often used where instructors believe there is something to be learned from taking part in a personal experience that resembles some similar real-life decisionmaking process. In the traditional form, these simulations provide students with the opportunity to make a decision or a series of related decisions where the decision topic and context are artificially created and controlled. Usually this consists of defining a number of different roles that students are assigned to play. The context is designed to constrain the decision in controlled ways, and the students playing the roles are usually free to interact in whatever way they wish within the constrained context. For example, an instructor might create a simulation of a government budgeting process where some students play the role of budget requestors, and other students play the role of budget approvers, perhaps to mimic the process of deciding federal agency budget requests by Congressional appropriations committees. Presumably, the specific tasks assigned to the students, the type of decisions that have to be made, and every other aspect of the simulation, are designed to teach students specific lessons about budgeting, the budgetary process, or both. One challenge in the creation of such simulations is to construct the simulation with enough realism to make it engaging and yet not so much that the central lessons are lost or difficult to find because of excessive complexity.

Based on the topic of the simulation and curriculum plan for supporting its use, specific lessons about decisions and decision making vary considerably. Sometimes simulations and related lessons focus on the impossibility or difficulty of making decisions in some areas, sometimes they focus on specific factors that influence decisions to be made one way rather than another. For example, a simulation could be designed to show that if one decision process is used, a particular decision is more likely to be made than if a different decision process is used.

This volume extends the focus from traditional role-play simulations into the digital world. Increasingly, digital technologies are being employed to create simulations for use in education, and the contention of this volume is that bringing technology into the equation has altered the general technique to make it more efficient and/or more effective in improving learning goals. The reasons underlying this contention will be explained in more detail over the next two chapters, with examples found in chapters five through ten. It is important at this point to be clear about what it means to bring role-play decision simulations into the digital world.

Digital role-play decision simulations are defined as social process simulations that are delivered using some form of digital technology. Earlier uses of technology for delivering simulations simply made accessible the same written materials and documents that might have been printed on paper and handed out in class. So frequently digital technology simply provides a mechanism for conveniently making accessible simulation materials that are stored on some digital medium, such as a DVD, CD-ROM, or even a floppy zip disk. Increasingly it means making the simulations accessible over the Internet or World Wide Web that, if nothing else, makes the distribution of simulation materials very efficient. More and more commonly it means developing digital video assets to help define the decision scenario and create the context in which the decisions are made. Moving well beyond the paper-and-pencil variety of simulations, digital simulations frequently try to improve upon the realism of the decision context by building truer pictures, or virtual environments, of the decision scenarios or elements of the decisions themselves.

Regardless of the mechanism for delivery, simulations invite a certain amount of interactivity as thought to be necessary in order to achieve the desired learning goals. Like any component of a curriculum, part of the job of a simulation is to engage students in the topic and learning process. In the traditional role-play simulation, students interact with each other in a classroom setting or immediately outside of class as they progress through the decision process. Sometimes the interactions are scripted and scheduled, and sometimes they are spontaneous. Usually such interactions are in person. In the digital world, this interactivity might simply represent interactions between individual students and a computer. Sometimes it reflects interactions between and among students in a class or in related classes using e-mail, chatrooms, bulletin boards, or other interactive communication mechanisms. Increasingly, as digital media become more and more sophisticated, such interactions include situations where the computer itself plays a virtual role in interacting with students. In chapters 5 through 10 there will be numerous examples where the computer has been designed to perform the interactions believed to be necessary to maximize achievement of learning goals.

To summarize, digital role-play decision simulations represent efforts to create synthetic or artificial decisions situations to teach students about the designated decisions or their underlying processes. They require that students play roles and participate in the decision and use digital technologies in order to deliver simulation materials and to facilitate some sort of interpersonal interactions.

Why Role-Play Simulations are Needed: Theoretical Frameworks

Why do we go through the trouble of creating sophisticated role-play simulations to teach students about complex social decisions? We hope to illustrate why we believe understanding social decisions, such as prison sentences handed down by judges, or allocations of natural resources, or resolving value conflicts, to name a few, is so challenging both to teach and to learn. In the simplest terms, the problem stems from the challenge of appreciating the context in which the decision maker makes a social decision. We suggest that unless you can put yourself in the shoes of the decision maker and understand the context in which the decision is made, you have not really understood the decision. It is acquiring the detailed context, and the ability to understand a decision in light of this context, that is such a formidable educational challenge. We, as social animals, are not cognitively equipped to do this. Research in psychology suggests that there are cognitive filters in place that make it extraordinarily difficult for students to appreciate a decision context outside of themselves. In addition, social decisions are typically taught by books, teachers, or both, further removing the student from the context of the decision maker. The end result is a student who knows what decision was made, but does not understand the context that motivated the decision. The goal of this volume is to identify the genesis of this problem and offer a prescription for improving students understanding of social decisions. The prescription is the use of realistic multimedia-based simulations delivered in a sound instructional environment.

Introduction to the Psychological Justification for Digital Role-Play Simulations

For the most part, elements of the educational problem have been identified over the past 50 years, but have not necessarily been catalysts for developing and using simulations to teach social decisions. Since the cognitive revolution in the 1950s (Gardner, 1985), attention has been focused on what goes on inside our student’s minds. It took the move to cognitive models of human thought to provoke interest in how people make decisions. Research in the area of judgment and decision making confirms that decision processes are complex. A social context brings an added dimension of complexity. Given this picture of social decisions, what is it we hope students will learn about social decision making? By what means can the chances of instructional success be improved?

While research on judgment and decision making has moved forward since the 1950s, it has not explicitly pointed to problems or suggested a need for improvements with the way students understand social decisions. In the present case, the origins of this volume come principally from three separate but related fields. First, it comes from research in math and science education. In that arena, a healthy part of the psychological and educational community has been concerned with how students are, or are not, learning math and science. Much of the research has focused on ideas in probability and physics that many students, and sometimes experts, find almost impossible to learn (as anyone who has taught statistics knows all too well). A key part of that research has focused on why certain ideas are so difficult to master, and much of the research points to limitations imposed by students’ preexisting ways of thinking and their epistemology. We see that these kinds of limitations, or biases in thinking, play a similar role in students’ inability to master the often-complex concepts that underlie many social decisions.

A second area of research comes from generative learning, an area of learning research that requires students to reconcile confusing ideas. This field looks at the improved memory for ideas when students experience an “aha” phenomenon. For example, when students see the sentence “the house became smaller when the sun came out” they are confused until they hear the word “igloo.” This kind of experience results in durable semantic memory for the ideas, a form of transformation that helps students see the world in new ways. Often this kind of transformation is crucial for students to realize the limits of their own ways of understanding social decisions. Our experience suggests that when students participate in well-designed role-play simulations and related instructional contexts, they often experience the “aha” effect that helps them realize what a limited and biased sense of the decision context they had attributed to the decision.

A third area of research that helps justify the use of role-play simulations comes from the meaningful use of situations to anchor learning and multimedia to create the most intuitive, widely applicable, decision contexts. This branch of research points to the potential for creating contexts that root learning in virtual situations and mimic real life circumstances. A key part of the simulation approach is to improve the chance that learning, which takes place in an educational setting, will transfer to the real world. By creating contexts that inspire similar emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to those experienced in real life, and permit students to focus all their cognitive resources on the decisions they will be making, the chance that students will actually understand and apply what they have learned improves.

Ideas from all three areas of research apply to how students come to understand social decisions, and decision making, as well. They form a set of building blocks for thinking about and designing simulations. Individual simulations designed to help address specific learning objectives may also draw on research from other areas of psychology and the social domain being modeled. The second half of this volume includes five examples of simulations used in curricula to teach social decisions. Each chapter considers in detail how subtle features of a simulation can incrementally improve education and address needs of particular students. However, the psychological foundations and motivations explored in this first chapter, spanning across all simulations discussed in this volume, come from these three strains of research. Each of these research areas deserves a closer look.

Learning from Educational Challenges in Math and Science Education

The challenge in teaching many critical ideas rooted in social decisions emerges from the same complex rubric that underlies teaching challenging concepts in mathematics and physical sciences. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Part I: Theoretical Frameworks
• Part II: Simulations in use and in Progress
• Author Index
• Subject Index