Educational Researcher

Transcending the low status of educational research will require demonstrating its relevance to improvements in practice. Educational progress is most likely to emerge from approaches to research that create an equal footing for practitioners and researchers, recognizing that though these groups accumulate and curate knowledge in different ways, they both have a role in creating tools (curricula, practices, professional development approaches) that can be used to forge lasting improvements. A brief history of the ongoing shift toward practice-embedded educational research (PEER) demonstrates its increasing acceptance and popularity and suggests modifications to the future selection of research topics, funding mechanisms, and professional preparation of both practitioners and researchers.

A chasm is growing between our rapidly rising aspirations for our educational systems and what schools can routinely accomplish. Education needs an improvement paradigm—one that recognizes the complexity of the work of education and the wide variability in outcomes that our systems currently produce. This article sketches out such a paradigm. It joins together the discipline of improvement science with the power of structured networked communities to accelerate learning to improve. These networked improvement communities (NICs) combine analytic thinking and systematic methods to develop and test changes that can achieve better outcomes more reliably. NICs are inclusive in drawing together the expertise of practitioners, researchers, designers, technologists, and many others. And they organize their activities in ways akin to a scientific community. They develop practice-based evidence as an essential complement to findings from other forms of educational research. The point is not just to know what can make things better or worse; it is to develop the know-how necessary to actually make things better.

Research suggests that well-designed games can be good for learning under the right conditions. How such games are designed remains poorly understood, as studies have focused more on whether games can produce learning than on how such games work or how they can be reliably developed. That is, though the design of a game is considered essential to its effectiveness, educational games lack a theory-informed definition and have predominantly shared design in terms of “principles” or “heuristics.” The aim of this paper is to discuss how we define and share educational game design and why design is important for improving educational game research and development.