“Developing an Education Policy Research Agenda outside Academia”

Lauren Bauer
Fellow in Economic Studies
Brookings Institution

Monday, March 4th
12:45PM-2PM
Annenberg G02

The shift toward accountability policies for schools over the past two decades—first introduced in some states, and made national under the No Child Left Behind Act—has been central to efforts to assess and achieve progress in public education. The new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, requires state-led accountability systems to annually measure five indicators that assess progress toward the state’s long-term goals. The fifth indicator, of “school quality and student success” marked the first time that schools would be systematically held accountable for a metric other than student achievement or graduation rates. Dr. Bauer will discuss developing and implementing a research agenda that is relevant to this new policy parameter as well as to policymakers, regulatory processes, the media, and the public.

“Spatial Reasoning in Minecraft”

Marcelo Worsley
Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Computer Science
Northwestern University

Wednesday, February 27th
12:45PM-2PM
Annenberg 303

Minecraft is often touted as a game that affords important Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics learning opportunities. Proponents are quick to note the ways that Minecraft might promote spatial reasoning, a skillset that strongly correlates with STEM proficiency. Despite this claim, few papers have chronicled in-game practices that might evidence spatial reasoning, or how we might study its development. In this paper, we describe both quantitative and qualitative evidence for correlations between Minecraft game play and spatial reasoning. At a high level, we see that students with more prior experience with Minecraft score higher on a spatial reasoning pre-test. While we do not attribute differences in spatial reasoning to Minecraft, our qualitative analyses surface a number of in-game practices that align with spatial reasoning. We chronicle some of these behaviors to highlight a set of practices that may be beneficial for studying the development of spatial reasoning in game-based environments.