Gee’s 36 learning principles

Gee’s 36 learning principles

These principles are typed verbatim from the Appendix to What Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning. Throughout the book, Gee positions these as principles that good games have and that learning in and out of schools should have.

1. Active, Critical Learning Principle: All aspects of the environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical,  not passive, learning.
   
2. Design Principle: Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.
   
3. Semiotic Principle: Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
   
4. Semiotic Domains Principle: Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
   
5. Metalevel thinking about semiotic domains principle: Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.
   
6. “Psychosocial Moratorium” Principle: Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.
   
7. Committed learning principle: Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as an extension of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they find compelling.
   
8. Identity principle: Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to mediate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, virtual identity, and a projective identity.
   
9. Self-knowledge principle: The virtual world in constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but about themselves and their current and potential capacities.
   
10. Amplification of input principle: For a little input, learners get a lot of output.
    
11. Achievement principle: For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner’s level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.
    
12. Practice principle: Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e., in a virtual world that is compelling to the learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
    
13. Ongoing learning principle: The distinction between learner and master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the “regime of competence” principle listed next, must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, and undoing automatization, and new reorganized automatization.
    
14. “regime of competence” principle: The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not “undoable.”
    
15. Probing principle: Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.
    
16. Multiple routes principle: There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.
    
17. Situated meaning principle: The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up via embodies experiences.
    
18. Text principle: Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e. only in terms of the definitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when learners have had enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences with similar texts.
    
19. Intertextual principle: The learner understands texts as a family (“genre”) of related texts and understands any one such text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a group of texts as a family (genre) of texts is a large part of what helps the learner make sense of such texts.
    
20. Multimodal principle: Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.
    
21. “material intelligence” principle: Thinking, problem solving, and knowledge are “stored” in tools, technologies, material objects, and the environment. This free learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in these tools, technologies, material objects, and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.
    
22. Intuitive knowledge principle: Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience, often in an association with an affinity group, counts a great deal and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.
    
23. Subset principle: Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain.
    
24. Incremental principle: Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the hypothesis space (the number and type of guesses the learner can make) is constrained (guided) by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalizations the learner has found earlier.
    
25. Concentrated sample principle: The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of fundamental signs and actions than would be the case n a less controlled sample. Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.
    
26. Bottom-up basic skills principle: Basic skills are note learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more of the genre/domain or game/domain like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.
    
27. Explicit information on-demand and just-in-time principle: The learner is given explicit information both on demand and just in time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.
    
28. Discovery principle: Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.
    
29. Transfer principle: Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.
    
30. Cultural models about the world principle: Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways.
    
31. Cultural models about learning principle: Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models of learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners.
    
32. Cultural models about semiotic domains principle: Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration to their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.
    
33. Distributed principle: Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.
    
34. Dispersed principle: Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see fact to face.
    
35. Affinity group principle: Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture.
    
36. Insider principle:  The learner is an “insider,” “teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “consumer”) able to customize the learning experience and domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience.

What Gee has to Teach Us About Games, Learning, and Problem Solving

What Gee has to Teach Us About Games, Learning, and Problem Solving

In What Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee delivers his early theses and reflections on the relations between games, learning, and problem solving. He later changes some parts of his overall position on games and learning in some talks that he gives and articles or chapters he writes, but to understand the more recent version of his framework, we have to understand the early version of his framework, which appears to have made ripples in the ways that the study of game-based learning have become more mainstream.

Gee writes that he picked up playing video games after observing the ways in which his son appears to have learned from playing games, and that he experienced 3 realizations from playing games:

1.     Games require players to learn and think in ways that require novel solutions, not routine solutions from our daily lives that we might be eager to easily apply (p. 2).

2.     Some people are not used to having to inhibit the common or routine solutions, and confronting the new ways of learning and thinking necessary to conquer the game’s challenges can be both frustrating and “life-enhancing,” allowing the player—or learner—to experience “pleasant frustration” (p. 3).

3.     Gamers don’t like short or easy games, they usually like easy-to-learn-to-play games and dislike games that are hard to learn, and good games (ones that gamers buy, play, and deem worth the money) have principles of learning built into the design of the game, not just the experience of learning to play the game (3).

According to Gee, one of the keys to making a good game is “finding ways to make hard things life-enhancing so that people keep going and don’t fall back on learning only what is simple and easy” (p. 3). He adds that the third realization (see above) is important to the study of gameplay, game-based learning, and formal learning in general (1-3), and much of the reminder of his book establishes the definition and relevance of 36 learning principles.

Before listing out these principles, it’s important to recognize the influence of Gee’s prior background on the semiotics-based framework Gee uses to articulate, understand, and apply the 36 principles. In his earlier works, Social Linguistics and Literacies and The Social Mind, Gee argued that literacy and thinking are social and cultural achievements, not just mental achievements by an individual (5). Not only do people read and think in different ways, but they also always read or think in some particular way; it’s never just reading or thinking “in general” (5). Gee argues that one’s experiences with others who are members of various social or cultural groups who, through social practices, encourage reading or thinking in some way. One can never think or read outside of every group (i.e. without using standards of thinking and reading that don’t align with any group); meaning is relative to the purposes and practices for reading and thinking that are specific to a group (6). Gee writes that these different social identities we uphold, in real life or a virtual world as in games, “lead to different ways of looking at, feeling about, and interacting with” the world (7).

Like reading and thinking, learning and gaming are never “in general” or separate from social identities. Gee extrapolates this implication for the nature of different academic disciplines or learning domains:

“But all learning is, I would argue, learning to play “the game.” For example, literary criticism and field biology are different “games” played by different rules. (They are different sorts of activities requiring different values, tools, and ways of acting and thinking; they are different domains with different goals and different “win states.”)” (7-8).

To better elucidate his insights, Gee centers his book around semiotics—the study of how signs, including text, images, sounds, gestures, movements, graphs, equations, objects, and humans, have meanings—and then gives his definition of semiotic domains: a set of practices wherein people think act, value, and make and communicate meanings in certain ways by using one or more modalities (sounds, music, bodily sensations, oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, gestures, etc.) (18-19). This is Gee’s semiotics-based framework through which he defines and examines games and learning… and apparently problem solving, for Gee defines games as sets of problems to be solved. Thus, in Gee’s framework, games, learning, and problem solving are bound up together as constructs that each try to carve out parts of some important semiotic domain that Gee values, and Gee examines them for learning principles that can help us achieve in more complex, higher-order semiotic domains, such as those one encounters in schooling.