A study released by Getting Smart shows a correlation between Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) outcomes and gaming.
The researchers surveyed a diverse group of teachers from 11 countries across 4 continents, with the aim of providing insights on the implementation of gaming in education. The findings are encouraging:
- 97.7% of teachers cited problem solving as the top SEL skill that students learn from classroom Minecraft lessons.
- Other top skills cultivated include creativity (95.5%), critical thinking (93.3%) and collaboration (91.1%).
- The majority of teachers also felt that their students’ decision-making (88.8%) and communication (86.6%) abilities were positively impacted.
- Just over half (51.1%) believe that Minecraft also enables students to build empathy skills.
Caroline Vander Ark, Getting Smart COO, remarked that teachers are the key factor in enabling gaming to provide good results.
“We also found that the most critical component to connecting gaming and student SEL outcomes is the teacher. The educators we visited and spoke with were transparent about learning objectives, promoted student agency and independence and acted as learning guides,” said Vander.
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0