Educators as Facilitators of Game-Based Learning

Innovative educational methods such as gamification are gaining ground in more formal environments and have great potential to improve learning in education. However, the implementation of this strategy in the classroom is assumed to be a complex practice for beginners and requires the development of new competencies by educators. This chapter aims to contribute to the advancement of knowledge about the main competencies needed for educators to perform as facilitators of educational games. The study was developed through critical literature review, interviews, and questionnaires. The outcome is the development of a framework of competencies of an educator willing to use game-based learning. The study highlights the importance of institutional support to boost the development of pedagogical, technological, and social skills among educators. The conclusions of the chapter are valuable for educators aiming to adopt game-based learning and to higher education decision makers committed to expanding innovative learning contexts on their institutions.

Make sense of the research: A primer for educational leaders

Education leaders know that they should use research when choosing interventions for their schools, but they don’t always know how to read the research that is available. David Steiner explains some of the reasons that reading research is a low priority for educators on the front lines and offers some guidance for determining whether research results are meaningful without an extensive background in statistics. Ideally, education decision makers should look for randomized control trials with high effect sizes and low p-values.

The Business of Creating Games

The use of digital games and gamification has showed potential to improve many aspects of how businesses provide education and communicate with consumers. Nevertheless, there is still a requirement for better considerate of how the adoption of games and gamification would influence the process of decisionmaking for customer and organizations across different industry. This article provides a structured review of existing literature on the use of games in the business ecosystem, and seeks to consolidate findings to address research questions regarding their perception, proven efficiency, and identifies key areas for future business. The findings highlight that serious games can have positive and effective impacts in multiple areas of business, including education, decision-support, marketing and consumer outreach. They also emphasize the challenges and pitfalls of affecting serious games and gamification principles within a business context, and discuss the implications of development and evaluation methodologies on the success of a game-based solution.

Young people engaging in event-based diaries: A reflection on the value of diary methods in higher education decision-making research

This paper reflects on the value of diary methods in the context of a qualitative, longitudinal narrative inquiry exploring the higher education decision-making of further education students in England. Event-based diaries were used alongside interviews and focus groups over a 14-month period to gain in-depth insights into the reasons and influences informing their decision-making trajectories. I explore the challenges, successful approaches and advantages of employing diary methods with young people in this context. Challenges consisted of maintaining participant engagement, which was overcome by combining methods and incorporating a reactive co-participatory element. Yet, a number of advantages emerged from participants' engagement with diary keeping which enhanced the richness of the data; this inspired deeper reflections on decision-making and influences and provided a private space for participants to disclose personal difficulties that could not be obtained via interviews.

Web-Based DSS for Resource Allocation in Higher Education

The allocation of scarce resources is a complex higher education decision problem, especially when it comes to budget constraints. Therefore, the authors propose a multicriteria web-based decision support system for resource allocation in higher education organizations. To do so, they define an MCDA/M resource allocation model, based on a project portfolio selection problem to set the percentage of the total budget that every alternative should receive. For the web-based DSS, they develop a database model to store and retrieve data, define the user's interface, and they use a web platform to transform the prototype into a web-based system. Also, they run an empirical analysis with an end-user to test the DSS. They show that the system can provide a clear vision of how the resource allocation system works; the mechanism as a whole becomes more transparent to those involved, enabling them to make efficient and reasonable decisions.

Twenty years of gender equality research: A scoping review based on a new semantic indicatorr

Gender equality is a major problem that places women at a disadvantage thereby stymieing economic growth and societal advancement. In the last two decades, extensive research has been conducted on gender related issues, studying both their antecedents and consequences. However, existing literature reviews fail to provide a comprehensive and clear picture of what has been studied so far, which could guide scholars in their future research. Our paper offers a scoping review of a large portion of the research that has been published over the last 22 years, on gender equality and related issues, with a specific focus on business and economics studies. Combining innovative methods drawn from both network analysis and text mining, we provide a synthesis of 15,465 scientific articles. We identify 27 main research topics, we measure their relevance from a semantic point of view and the relationships among them, highlighting the importance of each topic in the overall gender discourse. We find that prominent research topics mostly relate to women in the workforce–e.g., concerning compensation, role, education, decision-making and career progression. However, some of them are losing momentum, and some other research trends–for example related to female entrepreneurship, leadership and participation in the board of directors–are on the rise. Besides introducing a novel methodology to review broad literature streams, our paper offers a map of the main gender-research trends and presents the most popular and the emerging themes, as well as their intersections, outlining important avenues for future research.

Resilience Despite “Integration:” Black Men Educators' Perceptions About and Responsibility to Equitable Representation in K-12 Education

Almost seven decades after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision, African American/Black men are still vastly underrepresented in the K-12 public education profession. In this qualitative, phenomenological research study, a small sample of Black men educators who chose to enter and remain in the profession, shared their lived experiences. Three research questions informed this study: (1) What are African American/Black men’s perceptions of their representation in the K-12 public education profession? (2) What are African American/Black men’s perceptions regarding their entrance and retention in the K-12 public education profession? and (3)What are African American/Black men’s perceptions regarding the responsibilities African American men have to and within the K-12 public education profession? Findings show that while Black men are still underrepresented in K-12 public education, they have been resilient in remaining in the field and defining their roles, commitments, and responsibilities despite feelings of isolation, tokenism, and stereotypes.