My latest collaboration with Dr. Lisa Kerr was published today in the new, open-source peer-reviewed journal, International Perspectives on Military Education, of which I am also a founder and contributing editor. Click here to read it in full!
But here’s the brief version: This is a follow up to our 2024 Journal of Political Science Education article on the War at Sea war-game and the quasi-experiment we conducted comparing students who learned material solely through readings, case study, and discussion v. those who also played a war-game on the content. We found that students who did not war-game showed no significant learning between their pre- and post-test, which consisted of objective questions on the case studies as designed by faculty in the department. The wargaming students, however, showed statistically significant learning compared to their pre-tests and to the non-wargaming students.
This new article considers the subjective student perspective on the same game experience. We asked three questions: do students want to learn via educational wargaming? Do they believe they learn, regardless of what the objective data shows? And do they view gaming as an appropriate instructional tool for adult, professional learners? Our results showed support for all three questions, which should provide some comfort to those who are worried about students responding negatively to being asked to play serious games in the classroom.
Two additional findings worth noting: first, after their gaming experience, students significantly increased their ranking of wargaming in terms of preferred learning modalities, from 40% listing it as a top three learning technique to 77%. This suggests that an early, successful experience in gaming sets students up to continue learning that way–and also indicates that such students may have reduced preference for more traditional methods of learning in the future.
Second, students rate the debriefing as the lowest of the three phases in terms of importance for their learning, valuing the gameplay and preparation stages much higher. This suggests a mismatch in terms of scholarly understanding of the value of the debriefing in ensuring knowledge transfer and deeper learning, and student understanding of the importance of that phase. Faculty using educational gaming techniques may need to be more transparent with students about the importance of the debrief so that students put the time and energy into that essential time for processing and reflection.
We are very excited to see this in print, and open-source so that it’s accessible to all.