Reflections

I chose Tabletop as my observation site because I like playing games no matter board games or video games and I have learned a lot from them, such as language, strategy, and communication. Reviewing the three months of observing Tabletop through the theoretical lens of Constructivism, I found a lot of learning examples in different episodes and tried to explain the learning phenomena contained in the episodes with the theories of learning. At first, I didn't really know how to write a good research question that combined with a Constructivism lens, so I wrote nearly 10 research questions and each of which was very broad. In addition, in the early stage of observing Tabletop, I always confused learning with victory, thinking that learning would definitely lead to victory, but in fact, this is not the case. I also used binary methods to think about prior knowledge. In the original research question, I mentioned how players with prior knowledge (who have played such board games) and players without prior knowledge (who have not played such board games) develop strategies differently, but I should actually say how specific prior knowledge works in games. For example, the player had an experience of lying to his/her mom and used it in the deception game.

My strategy for the first analytic memo was to focus on the episode of The Resistance and try to find more learnings occurring in this episode. My strategy turned out to be wrong, and I should have found multiple episodes of appropriate evidence to support my claims. In my analytic memo set, I try to focus on the three types of metacognitive knowledge, declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge, as well as three metacognitive forms of thinking, metacognitive monitoring, metacognitive control and self-regulate learning, and try to find their relationship in different episodes.

In the literature reference collection, I found that declarative and procedural knowledge is not parallel to conditional knowledge. This is because in most cases, the player's declarative (what) and procedural knowledge (how) support conditional knowledge (when), which means conditional knowledge cannot be produced without declarative and procedural knowledge. Players will develop self-regulated learning based on these three types of knowledge, which will better help players connect and transfer their domain knowledge to a new context and ultimately achieve their goals. In addition, the multiple appearances of metacognitive scaffolding in the episodes also attracted my attention. The metacognitive scaffolding provided by experienced players to novice players not only helps novice players to reason, reflect, self-monitor and self-control, but also associated with the Legitimate Peripheral Participation theory within the Situativity lens which is scaffolding provided by an experienced player not only be able to help the novice player meet the goal/finish the task but also the experienced player as the old-comer guides the new-timer and gradually brought them to the community of practice or collaborative teamwork.

Although I have observed a lot of learning situations in Tabletop, I hope to continue to improve my conceptual framework in future studies and seek more connections with the other three lenses based on the Constructivism that I am familiar with. I also hope to test my conceptual framework on different sites in the future and modify it.