Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in…

While career and technical education (CTE) has been an important part of the U.S. education system for decades, other countries have been slower to adopt and develop similar types of training. Realizing that CTE is crucial to developing homegrown talent capable of competing in a 21st century economy, countries like China are reaching out to…

In June 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games enjoy full free speech protections and that the regulation of violent game sales to minors is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also referred to psychological research on violent video games as "unpersuasive" and noted that such research contains many methodological flaws.…

Game-design programs are relatively new in the world of academia, as the author of this article discovered when she worked as Brown College's librarian and learning resource center coordinator. With that newness comes the challenge of determining a "core" collection of materials to support the discipline. This kind of core collection is…

Of the 53 million K-12 students in the United States, 93%, or 51 million, of them play video games (Etuk, 2008). ALTEC Learning Games utilize the excitement of video games to engage students and provide teachers authentic online resources that reinforce skills in math and language arts. Our recent work was partially supported by a partnership with…

Video games have become a powerful force in the culture. Depictions of women in video games are scarce and highly stereotypical. Women are usually minor characters, are seen as victims rather than heroines, and are depicted in highly sexualized ways. Whereas early games had only a few representations of people of color, people of color were often…

Gaming equipment (such as Nintendo's Wii[TM]) is making its way to schools and classrooms. However, most of the discussion regarding how to use this technology and integrate it into lesson plans is happening in blogs on the Internet. An advocate of interactive media in the classroom, Dr. Dawn Hawkins, a faculty member for the Art Institute of…

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, a research project was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of video games as inquiry-based learning experiences for the science classroom. As a result, the video game, "Creature Control: The Quest for Homeostasis" was developed and field-tested in select middle schools in the United States.…

Today's K-20 students have been called, among other names, the net generation. As they matriculate through the education system, they are often exposed to materials and manipulatives used for the past 40 years, and not to the digital media to which they are accustomed. As student scores continue to regress from Grade 3 to Grade 12 and technical…

The gender issue is relevant to classroom learning in more ways than one. Increasingly in the United States, young boys are saying that school is stupid and they do not like to read. This phenomenon cuts across all demographic groups: it affects affluent white boys in the suburbs no less than it affects black boys in low-income neighborhoods. In…

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 3 children born in 2000 in the United States will become diabetic. The odds are higher for African American and Hispanic children as nearly 50% of them will develop diabetes. Random screening is not effective in identifying children at risk for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM);…

This article reports the potential of online role-playing games to be a powerful tool for English as a second language (ESL) learning. When Professor Edd Schneider and game designer Kai Zheng suggested to attendees gathered in San Francisco last spring for the annual Game Developers Conference that massively multiplayer online role-playing games,…

The greatest health risk facing children today is obesity. The prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States has risen dramatically in the past several decades. Because children on the average spend up to five or six hours a day involved in sedentary activities, including excessive time watching television, using the computer and playing…

In his recent bestseller The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues that countries like the United States can no longer compete in the global economy on the basis of making and selling commodities. Their competitive edge increasingly comes from how well they produce products, services, and technologies that are new . . . special . . .…