CBT and Pleasant Learning
CBT and Pleasant Learning
Learning should be fun, Bro and Sis!
“When I watch children playing video games at home or in the arcades, I am impressed with the energy and enthusiasm they devote to the task. … Why can’t we get the same devotion to school lessons as people naturally apply to the things that interest them?”
-Donald Norman, CEO, Unext
2020 will be the sixth year of the implementation of the computer-based national exam in Indonesia. Being the prime factor in figuring students’ success or failure for years, the current function of it has been transformed. It is not the main element anymore. Yet, it has several new roles, i.e., functioning as a quality mapping and program checking instrument for each level or unit of education, a bench-marking choice for high-level education entrance and as an indicator to help develop mediocre quality schools nationwide.
Furthermore, the exam has repositioned the essential role of each subject. Every subject portrays a balanced value. A fair and equal assessed policy should be the priority to ensure the best practice of multiple intelligence concepts proposed by Howard Gardner, an American prominent psychologist, and educator.
As a result, teachers, and schools seize the responsibility to check their students’ cognitive, affective, and psychomotor competencies to issue the last decision: pass or fail.
CBT
The computer-based test has started. A revolutionary step in the world of education in Indonesia has exactly begun. The fact is the use of technology has gained its formal place and momentum.
In contrast, the computer-based test policy leaves a critical question from the priority perspective of using technology in education since the absence of the government’s national program or policy on computer-based learning.
Then, the question is, why the government suddenly arrives at the last process of education? Is it for saving budget purposes only?
To make it clear, what the government needs to do is to start interesting digital-based learning. No late excuses for this reason. The government should announce publicly the current educational trend to the society or schools to make sure each party shares a common understanding of it.
So, how can teachers or schools realize it while waiting for the official announcement? A plain justification to this question is by implementing a video game-based learning.
Why video games?
In a 2015 forum called Rembuk Nasional Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan (National Culture and Educational Discussion Forum) held on March 29 in West Java, former Minister of Education and Culture Anies Baswedan argued for the idea of establishing a meaningful and pleasant education.
Furthermore, to respond to the minister’s brilliant idea, it is time for teachers or schools to conduct a digital game-based learning or what so-called video game-based learning.
Eric Jensen, in his Indonesian book version, Brain-Based Learning (2007: 261), mentioned that the ultimate reason involving students in an essential game is the biological reasoning. All mammals love to play. They learn to know each other, to know their counterpart habits, behavior, and others in a less-threatened environment via playing.
Referring to human’s perspective, when people play excitedly in a supportive condition, they may have chances to learn a variety of skills dealing with physical, emotional, social, and cognitive skills in their interaction, which significantly boosts their educational achievement.
But, unfortunately, the phenomena of using video games at school by students (digital natives) have gained massive opposition and rejection from teachers (digital immigrants) based on the assumption that students who repeatedly play video games justified as dull, inactive, self-centered and egocentric ones.
In addition to the stigma, video games also considered as having no educational value, producing no creativity and curiosity, deploying unsystematic procedures, losing its challenging sense, setting no purpose, giving no reward and other harmful stamps.
Hence, altering, and updating such an accepted point of view toward the use of video games should become the teachers, educators, and other stakeholder priority, after the ongoing reality in education. Keeping up the new horizon of education is a real challenge, as all students now living in the digital world.
Perhaps many of them, if not all, dream about having a fun and enjoyable learning similar to what they experience from the video game as well.
However, probably unbeknownst to many teachers, there have been various empirical studies and research widely published to confirm the positive impact of video games on learning.
According to Prensky (2001), the gameplay has a dozen of interesting characteristics, i.e., (1) Games are a form of fun that gives us enjoyment and pleasure, (2) Games are the forms of play which give us intense and passionate involvement, (3) Games have rules that give us structure, (4) Games have goals that give us motivation, (5) Games are interactive that gives us doing, (6) Games are adaptive that gives us flow, (7) Games have outcomes and feedback that gives us learning, (8) Games have win states that give us ego gratification, (9) Games have conflict/competition/challenge/opposition that gives us adrenaline, (10) Games have problem-solving that sparks our creativity
, (11) Games have interaction that gives us social groups
, and (12) Games have representation and story that gives us emotion.
Since the overall listed characteristics of video games have fulfilled all the requirements of perfect learning (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor), no reason for teachers and schools to neglect the use of video games in the classrooms as a way out for a better teaching and learning experience.
In conclusion, the government has just established a sustainable digital-based test. What the government needs to consider is to launch a digital-based learning environment to ease pleasant learning as proposed by the former Minister of Education and Culture, as we know that good result comes from excellent processes.