Gamification (Oh crap, that thing i've heard stuff about)

Gamification is a concept that challenges the methods (and i would argue the direction) we teach students in the American Education System.  Gamification refers to a restructuring of the classroom learning system and makes students both more accountable for their own learning, and gives them motivators that would assist them in meeting those educational expectations that we have for them.  Everyone (I Truly Hope) wants their children to succeed at school and move on towards a happy, fulfilling future, and in some ways the way we teach students is not helping them meet that goal.

When we look at how we teach students, we look at a lot of positives and a couple of severe stumbling blocks.  Students are not ready for college (and by college i mean any post high school education program, be it military, vocational training, or a traditional college) and i think that the methods we use to educate are just as much a problem as what we are teaching them.

One of the main problems with education that i see is the rampant over utilization of standardized testing.  School districts have federal grants tied to the outcome of their student's performance on standardized testing.  This causes an astonishing amount of pressure on the school to perform. This means you have administrators pushing teachers, who in turn push students to perform better on these tests.  In some cases, you have teachers who are teaching to the expectations of the test, rather than the curriculum.

This means that the student's needs for learning the approved curricular standards (whether they are common core, or what have you) are not being met because the system has prioritized performance in student scores over student learning.  This means that the students aren't being prepared for the situations that are awaiting them once they've escaped the American education system.

Gamification addresses this in a couple of key ways.  The focus on Gamification is a change in the focus of how student learning is monitored, and the progress that we expect them to make.  Gamification boils down to applying game logic to real world situations and using that metric style to track how and what our students learn.  By crafting the lessons in a gamified method, you can better prepare students to develop the skills and necessities for a successful life?

Now that's a big complicated series of words that doesn't necessarily help you understand what we're talking about, so let me break it down a little more concisely for you. Gamification focuses on a student proving to you (the educator, the parent, the whoever else may be responsible) that they are capable of performing the tasks you expect them to do.  Just like collecting a trick in a game of bridge, or completing a quest in a video game, you (as the learner) have to demonstrate that you have the necessary capabilities to perform that task.

Once a student has shown a specific mastery in a concept, they can move into more complex concepts in the same topic.  Each completed topic increases your depth of knowledge in that area and prepares you to dig deeper into it.  You can't start to do mathematics if you don't understand numbers, for example.  But once you have that basic grasp of numbers, you can start to learn arithmetic, which lays the foundations for geometry and algebra.  You can't move into a topic you aren't prepared for because you are never given the option until you can demonstrate a mastery of the basic concepts.

Gamification looks at education as a means of producing artifacts and work samples that demonstrate that you, the learner, are capable of showing us, the rest of the world, that you are ready to produce work and have the capabilities needed to be successful.  If we don't prepare you for the future, how can we expect you to succeed? 

Psychology (Yeah, this isn't going to be as fun as Comic books and video games)

Ah, yes, Psychology, that thing that almost all of us had to sit through as undergraduate students, and some of us decided might have some neat possibilities for a potential future/career.  First, i have a B.S. degree in Psychology, as well a M.S. in School Psychology.  So you can say i've spent more than my fair share of time in a classroom listening to a droning lecture about Freud, some other stuff i didn't care about, and Pavlov's wicked cool dogs.

That being said, when people find out that i have a pair of degrees in psychology, the reactions are either mixed, or critical.

"Oh, you're one of those people."

"Hey, i keep thinking things about other things, what do you think that means?"

"Should i hurt myself?"

Yeah, this seems like a Tuesday.

In a response to the above questions, in order.

"Yep, one of those people"

"I think you should sit down and think about why you're thinking about that thing now when it hasn't been so much of a thing until recently."

"No, you should not hurt yourself, you need to find some much more competent help than me at your earliest convenience."

What is Psychology?  Nope, not going into some deep, introspective thoughts about the ideal of psychology, or what psychology should be.  I tend to think that's a more personal question that you, as a potential, future or past student of psychology to decide for yourself.  I try to stay away from the opinions side of things, and let the facts (the ones that there are) speak for themselves.

Psychology is the study of the mind. The philosophy of things at the school i attended tracked psychology along three axes.  Affect, which is your apparent emotional state and the psychological cues you'll share with the world around you.  Behavior, which is the observable actions you take and the consequences that follow them.  Finally, Cognition, which is the way you think about things, and the things you think about.  Together, these collective concepts were referred to as the ABC's of Psychology.

Affect is an interesting area of study because it encompasses your emotions and the way they are presented in response to Stimuli, (Oh, a word for the Jargon board).  A healthy Affect means that a person is happy when they encounter something that makes them happy, or sad when they encounter something that is supposed to make them sad.  People experiencing things that make them sad or angry should have appropriate emotional responses.  That's healthy, and it often means that the Affect part of things is working the way its supposed to.  People who react either in the extreme, or who don't react at all, (called a flat Affect) could be experiencing some sort of psychological stress or trauma.  People who react inappropriately (Crying at parties, or laughing at funerals) also likely have some sort of psychological issue.

Behavior is another neat psychological concept that drives the study of psychology (you could make the case that it IS the driving force of psychology).  Behavior is often described as how an organism reacts to the environment around it.  This concept is easier to study in other forms of life than Affect, because i can see how a mouse is going to physically navigate a maze, where i can't tell what his emotional state is while he's doing it.  Any task that can be observed and measured is a form of Behavior, whether it's rats navigating mazes, pigeons pecking at buttons for food, or how often freshmen college students attend class.

Cognition is the least understood portion of this trio, because it is the one with the lowest profile.  You can usually perceive when a person is happy or upset (assuming you have a normal level of emotional awareness), and you can observe a person navigating through their environment, (again, assuming a normal level of perceptive ability). Cognition is often an entirely mental process that has no observable "moving parts" to understand how they work.  Thinking and Learning are two of the core cognitive processes, but recognizing familiar and unfamiliar objects, identifying the direction sounds are coming from and figuring out the word that comes after the next one are all cognitive tasks.

Coming back around to the core question, what is Psychology?

I look at Psychology as the study of the brain, and how it affects our interactions with our environment.  The brain, in most cases, serves as the core of our decision making, information processing, and information storage.  Understanding how our brain works (and doesn't work) enables us to be better prepared for dealing with the day to day tasks of our lives.

As usual, any questions or comments are totally fun,