Simulation and Role Play II at TLC 2014

A few great papers so far in the track.   Michelle Allendoerfer from GWU gave a really interesting presentation on long-term retention of information.  She ran Statecraft in her class and then compared the final exam results to a quiz given to the same students two years later.  There is some work looking at long-term effects of simulations on student learning (Bernstein and Meizlich 2003; Nishikawa and Jaeger 2011), but this is very undeveloped–a notable lapse in our efforts to assess simulations.

Nikolaos Biziouras gave us another great simulation, this time on decision-making. He also proposed doing three waves of surveys, rather than the standard pre- and post-test model.  He surveyed students prior to the introduction of the relevant content as a baseline, then again post-content but pre-simulation, and then again after the simulation.  This seems a promising angle in order to test for the independent effect of simulations; right now we have a hard time separating the effect of preparatory and debriefing work form the simulation itself.

More to come, but lots of food for thought already.

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