Episode 21: The Social Science of Board Games with Dr. Kerri Evans
3:20PM Jun 10, 2022
Speakers:
Dr. Ian Anson
Campus Connections
Sophia Possidente
Dr. Kerri Evans
Keywords:
umbc
students
game
immigrant
research
classroom
teacher
evans
experiences
conversation
board
social science research
puzzle piece
cards
project
social sciences
success
learning
interested
resources
Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences. We bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.
Summertime is here, and I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking about hitting the beach. The sand, the waves, sunshine, and of course, the occasional thunderstorm. You know, as a social scientist, I'm skeptical of the notion that my arrival at the beach causes rain clouds to gather, but it sure seems like a strong correlation. And once I do inevitably arrive on my rain-soaked vacations, you know, there's not much to do other than record podcasts, read great social science research, and play board games with my family. I'm a huge fan of board games, and as it turns out, so is today's guest. But wait a minute, what do board games have to do with the social sciences? We're about to find out, thanks to my recent interview with Dr. Kerri Evans, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work here at UMBC. Dr. Evans, who arrived at UMBC in 2020, after completing a PhD in Social Work from Boston University, is especially interested in the lived experiences of immigrants. Her work, which has been published in a number of important social work journals, seeks to better understand how schools and communities can better welcome and support unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children. Dr. Evans' ongoing project seeks to develop a classroom simulation tool, otherwise known as a board game, that will help teachers and other school officials better understand how to help students. But unlike Monopoly, or Settlers of Catan, this board game has been assembled using a huge volume of social science research. Let's hear what Dr. Evans' game is all about. Oh, and before we jump into the interview, if you'd like to learn more about the game that Dr. Evans has created, including some awesome visuals of the game materials, check the show notes.
All right, Dr. Kerri Evans, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today about this really fascinating new research project. Now you're here on behalf of a larger research team, right?
Yeah, so I'm working on a project together with Dr. Jiyoon Lee and Keshia Allen in the School of Education, as well as a group of six research students from UMBC that span across the TSOL Department, the Social Work Department and the Psychology Department.
Awesome. I really love you know, whenever we get sort of cross curricular collaborations on the pod, and so it's really great to hear you shout out all these different departments and programs. And so in this project, right, this is a really cool project that recently was awarded a Hrabowski Grant to explore these ways to incorporate games and gamification into the classroom. And so, first of all, obviously, huge congratulations for getting this grant, this is a really cool thing. But beyond that, I'm really interested in understanding kind of what the various problems are that this grant is trying to solve.
Yeah, so great question. And I'm thrilled to be here today. I don't think I said that at the beginning. So thank you for having me. We're really trying to solve two problems. So the first is in terms of the pedagogy, like you said, right? College students are exhausted. College students have so much knowledge coming at them that I'm really a proponent for finding ways to do something other than a lecture. Do things it will give students either a memorable experience in the classroom, which I think is what this is, and/or conversation that will lead them to something that really matters in the future. So thinking about that translation to how does this relate to your career. And so when we build the class next spring, spring of 2023, we're hoping to run a class on campus. And it's really going to be focused on that. It's going to be experiential learning in the classroom, as well as this, what does it mean for life? What does it mean when you're a social worker or you're a teacher in the classroom? And how do we bring this to action? But the second problem really, you know, giving that overview is is what is the game about? So our game is focusing on the experience of immigrant children in the K through 12 education system here in the United States. So people come as an immigrant at any different age and/or are born here in the United States to immigrant parents. And what the research tells us, and where my research primarily lies, is at this intersection of immigrant students in schools and the multitude of challenges that they face. There's just so many of them. And what I find when I give lectures, or when I do a case study in a training, is that most people, when they think of an immigrant student in school, they picture one thing. They either picture the the high performing Asian students, they picture, the undocumented low-income student, they picture the bilingual Spanish student who's the star of the class, whatever it might be, they have one identity. And so our goal with the game was really to figure out how to change that perception, how to break down what is an immigrant? And how, how do we make people understand and learn about the 100 different immigration experiences that there are. That it's not just one, it's not the first person that comes to mind, but that these kids in and of themselves are incredibly diverse. So we've developed this board game that really is looking at what are the different immigrant experiences, as well as what are the services and systems in place and how can we, as social workers and teachers, change the process? How can we make these lives better? How can we help these kids to succeed so that all of them are the star students?
Wow, that is so cool to hear about the various layers of relevance really, that you're bringing in this project, both relevance in terms of sort of getting students out of that, you know, lecture modality in the classroom, which is just such an outmoded kind of thing. And the relevance in terms of the sort of recognition of the lived experiences of the students that you're sort of bringing to this game. Fascinating project, fascinating insights. So I want to sort of change direction a little bit. And, you know, perhaps this will be somewhat related to the main content of this, of this project. But so On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we're often interested in research methods, right. So this is a podcast about the social sciences. Obviously, what you're doing here is also grounded in the social sciences. And this, I think, episode is especially interesting to me, because I'm also a practitioner of what we might call SOTL, or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, right, where we try to apply some of the tools that we have as social scientists, to the classroom and to pedagogical perspectives. So I want to know a little bit more about this, this game that you created, and maybe how you might have used some of these tools, that we have in social sciences to inform this design.
Yeah, so this is such a funny question because students often hear about research and kind of roll their eyes. That's tedious. You know, that's too hard. I don't want to be a researcher, right. And we hear all of this lingo all the time. And so when we recruited our students for this project, we certainly marketed it as you're joining a team to build a board game, right. And that was cool and exciting to students. But their title was a research assistant. And we talked to them about how they were going to learn research and use research to help us create this game. So of course, we first trained the students in the research methods that we were going to use, but a lot of what they did was reading peer reviewed journal articles on research that's already been done on immigrant students, because there's a lot of it out there. So we read almost 200 different articles about the experiences that immigrant students face and tried to pull out from them what are the lessons learned, right? What are the common experiences, first of all? And then what does that experience translate to? And if it was a positive experience, kind of what helped them achieve that, right? So was it a teacher that went above and beyond? Was it a soccer coach that mentored a student? Was it a peer mentoring program that they got involved with? Was it a scholarship that they won, right? What were those mechanisms that helped kids succeed? So basically, in terms of research methods, what we did was a content analysis of these 200 journal articles to understand what were the experiences kids faced? What were the outcomes? And what were the facilitators of success? What were the barriers to success, of course, as well. And then we did the exact same thing, but rather than using peer reviewed articles, we use popular media - newspaper articles. Because there's a lot out there that happens, especially around graduation time, right, highlighting success stories in different communities across the US. And then there are, you know, horrible news articles written as well, when when somebody gets deported or when something tragic happens in their lives. So we did the same thing on a bunch of newspaper articles and pulled out the same themes, right? What were the barriers to success? What were the facilitators of success? What were these experiences that kids faced? So we used our research tools to digest the information, to digest what's out there, we already know about immigrants. And then the fun part was turning that into a board game, right? So we had all of these many faceted Excel tables that that everyone loves, and so we used that information to build the game cards. So in a board game, you frequently will pick up a card, and it will tell you to do something, right? It will give you a scenario. So we developed these cards for the game that will basically facilitate the playing of the game and where you move and what happens throughout it. And so on each card, there's a scenario of something that happens. And then there's an outcome in terms of like, moving the game forward, what happens? And on each of them, we actually also included the citation for what newspaper article or what journal article it comes from, as a way to kind of show that the game is based in research, right? That this is not something that we're just hypothetically talking about, an immigrant student could have this experience, or maybe this happens, but but that these are all true facts, and that not even a one-off, but that oftentimesf these are trends, these are common experiences, right. Things that we know about. And so I'll, I'm gonna read in just a second one of the cards for you. but I think first I want to explain how you win the game. So how you win is by achieving what we call success. And success looks different for everybody, especially in my opinion for immigrants, because your goals in life or your background may change what success is. So we have developed six measures of success: language, social support, happiness and mental health, which go together as one measure of success, school welcome, education, and stability. So we look at these six things, and each of them are actually a puzzle that you're building. So in addition to it being a board game, I'm, I'm a puzzler. I love puzzles. They're so fun. So they're just four pieces, they're very simple. But you basically in order to, what we're considering achieve success within language, you have to four times achieve a language puzzle piece, so that you can then put the language puzzle together, right.
And so the goal at the end of the game, it's a cooperative game that we're playing as a team. The goal at the end of this cooperative game is that as a team, you've built four of the six puzzles. And that's because maybe one student really excelled in language and social support. But maybe they never graduated high school. And that's okay, you can still have a really successful life by being successful in these other areas. Or maybe another student really struggles with language, but they have great mental health, and they have financial stability, and they have a high school graduation certificate, and they're ready to move forward. So we've left it a little bit ambiguous in that, as a team, you'll collect these puzzle pieces throughout the game. And then the hope is that at the end, you can build four of the six success measures. And so that's how you quote-unquote, win the game. So for an example, I want to read one of the cards to you. So our scenario that you might pick up says, "A school administrator develops a close relationship with a student, offering them support and light hearted encouragement. The immigrant student now looks forward to greeting this administrator when they arrive at school each day. And so the outcome in terms of playing the game says that you can either receive a school welcome puzzle piece, or a happiness and mental health puzzle piece, please discuss as a group, the impact that this one administrator could have on a student and decide which measure of success you think would be most likely to increase." And so really, what we're trying to do through the game is to encourage conversation among the group members and really discussing, well, what is "school welcome?" What is this idea of building staff and policies and other kids that are welcoming towards immigrants versus what is happiness and mental health, right? How does this one-on-one relationship impact the two things? So we're trying to create that dialogue?
So I have to say, Dr. Evans, first of all, I'm super blown away by this game and the thought that you put into it, not only because, as we've heard, this is really research informed, and I was super interested to know about the citations that you're including on these various cards. But also, I mean, you know, when we first started talking about games, and gamification, you know, of course, my mind sort of started to wander a little bit to some of the games that I've played in the past, you know, thinking about games, like Settlers of Catan you know, maybe some, some listeners are fans of a game like that, where, you know, we're trading sheep and wheat and this extremely abstracted kind of, you know, little island nation or whatever, whoever we're playing, you know, role playing as these settlers or whatever. But this is so grounded, right? So grounded in content, right, the methods of social science research, it's so grounded in lived experiences of people. And I'm really enthused to think about the kinds of conversations that it's going to engender in terms of students who are going to eventually fill some of these important roles in schools and other settings, actually getting, you know, experience, essentially, with tough questions with these kinds of situations. I mean, it really is a remarkable project. And so, I wanted to ask you, you know, what, what's the current phase of this? Obviously, you've created these resources, we've heard a little bit about some of these cards that you've got, the goals and the puzzle pieces and the outcomes of the game. When can we play it?
Yeah, so students are actually beginning to play it right now. We've had four different groups of students come in, and do what we're considering a pilot test of the game. Does the game work? So we have a board developed, and it's actually funny that you mentioned Settlers of Catan, because that's a little bit how we envision the physical being of the game. So it's a series of cards, they're square, not octagons, or whatever Catan is. But there are resources. So our board consists of tutoring, of an educational advocate, of a legal provider, of a community ESL program, of employment, of a mentoring program, of the public library. So they're all different resources that kids could access, or teachers could access on behalf of children. But, but where we are right now, so we're bringing in groups of people, and we're going to continue doing this through the rest of June, to test the game. And between each test we've basically gone and made a series of edits. So we're editing cards that people were confused about and didn't understand how to play. We are talking about whether or not to reduce the number of resources we have or increase the number of resources. But we're, we're making sure that the mechanics are working. At this point in time, of the four of them only one time has the group actually won the game. So we're maybe looking at is the game a little bit too hard, right? You lose by this stress meter that increases throughout a bunch of the different cards when something bad happens, your stress increases. And so do we perhaps have too many negative cards as opposed to positive cards in the game? So we're having those conversations right now. What we're hoping to do towards the latter part of June is to expand these testing sessions, and rather than just testing the mechanics, test the conversation and the meaning behind it. So we would have people play a game. And right now the conversation afterwards is what worked, what didn't work, what should we think about changing? But we'll edit that conversation in the next round. So in the next couple of weeks, and we'll have the conversation as if we were in the classroom. So we were in teacher education classroom talking about diversity. And we play this game for the first hour of class. And then we spend the second hour of class discussing, well, what does it mean? How does it relate to you as a teacher? What are some of the takeaways that we can do? Similarly, if we were in a social work classroom, you know, talking about immigrants and refugees, we would have that conversation. So that's where we're about to be is mocking that conversation, and what are the appropriate discussion questions? And how did they vary for different settings and different people playing the game?
Wow, that sounds like a really interesting step, especially as a researcher getting to sort of observe this from a hands-on perspective and sort of see it in action. It's gonna be very exciting, I think, somebody who's put in so much work to create this resource. So I want to know a little bit also about kind of the next steps, right? So I want to know, first of all about how you might see these kinds of tools, this game, being implemented in the UMBC setting, or in the sort of college setting. And then, perhaps, broadly, or even, even more expansively implemented beyond the, you know, hallowed halls of our esteemed institution.
Yeah. So I'll first give a shameless plug for myself and Dr. Allen, who will be running a course in spring of 2023, where we're going to primarily talk about immigrants in K through 12 education as the topic of the course. It's going to be run as a special topics, you know, first time new elective, see how it goes. But our main pedagogy for the class is going to be using this game in combination with roleplay. So playing the game and then taking a card. And one of those scenarios that we talked about and role playing it out. Where you have the student, the parent, the teacher, the counselor, perhaps a best friend, perhaps a an external community partner, going through and role playing out what does this look like? How do we address these complicated situations? What are those interpersonal skills that we use, and what resources are available? So that's that's the first way that we envision it. Unfortunately, I don't know that it will remain its own elective longterm just because it is such a niche area. So what I more realistically see happening is that we then take it down and we, rather than focusing on this as a semester long project, we really bring it down to a one module of a course. And my hope is that it's a module that can fit into our Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees course, which is extremely popular among social work majors as well as other UMBC students because it meets one of the GEP requirements. And this one day in class, we really talk about immigrants in the school system, and that the students would play this game and have this conversation. And that similarly in the teacher education program, and or the T ol program, because that's primarily a graduate program, so it could fit into both, we find a course where it fits in as one module. And my hope for this is that we are then preparing students who are specializing in TSoL in grad school, as well as all of our many students that go on to be educators in K through 12. As well as all of our students who are interested in social work with immigrants. That all of these students can leave UMBC having played this game, and my hope with that, really is that we're giving them some tools around what are resources that are available, we're building some empathy. But we're not giving a lecture, right? You receive so many lectures as a student, you can't remember them all. But my hope is that you haven't played a ton of games in class, and that in five years, you might remember this game and that it might stick with you. In terms of beyond UMBC, I think that's also a really key piece is that we're looking to train actual teachers and actual school social workers using this. And so once we have that one class module built, I envision using that exact same model, and taking it to teacher in-service days, at different levels of schools, whether that be Baltimore City, or Montgomery County, and going into the school system and working with, you know, the history teacher, with the ESL teacher, with the school cafeteria manager, and bringing these people together and playing the game and having a conversation. And I think that conversation might vary a little bit in that it would be action planning. And we would really talk about what is something informed by this game, informed by this conversation that we've now had, what is something that your school can do differently? And building an action plan around at least one short term goal, or maybe one short term, one long term, to make the schools more welcoming for immigrant students.
Wow, these are really exciting steps that I can imagine are going to have major impacts on, again, not just UMBC students, those in these various programs, those who are just sort of interested, you know, taking GEP courses, but also actual practitioners who are already in the schools. I mean, that's, that's a really incredible sort of foresight in terms of your, you know, desire to sort of get this, this tool out there to people. So I'm really hoping that the those steps are things you'll be able to accomplish in the near future, and that they'll have the impacts you envision, because it seems very clear that these kinds of conversations are desperately needed, and could have real impacts on the material lived experiences of students in our community and beyond. And, I mean, who knows, right? Maybe some of these resources will start to be implemented elsewhere, you know, beyond our, our own community if we're able to sort of package them up and share them with the broader scholarly, scholarly community. That'd be really cool. So again, thank you so much for telling us about this project. And again, we really hoped to get some updates perhaps in the near future about how things are going. Before we let you go. I have one more question for you that is a little bit more broad. So you know, a lot of the time I ask people who come on the podcast to give a word of advice to students, you know, people who might be listening to this podcast to learn a little bit more about the social sciences, who might be hoping to eventually go pro in the social sciences themselves. But given that, you know, Dr. Evans, we've got you here as kind of a teacher scholar, as somebody who's both interested in pedagogy and also well versed in research. I was wondering maybe if you had some advice, actually, for some of the faculty members who might be listening, some of the other teacher scholars in, on campus and beyond who might be tuning in. What kinds of words of advice might you have for them who are hoping to, you know, become better practitioners in the classroom and beyond?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think this is something that I've maybe already stated a little bit but really goes to my dislike for lecturing. It is the easiest way to convey information to students, it really is. You take something from the textbook or from a journal article, and you summarize the key bullet points. But I strongly, strongly encourage folks to find other creative ways to share information. And so what I try to do is each semester, take one component of a lecture and do something more creative, because you can't do it every week, it takes hours upon hours to create a case study, to create a dynamic conversation. I mean, a board game is taking us two years to create, right? We can't expect faculty to do this all the time. But each semester, if there's one 30-minute component of a lecture that you could turn into something active, change that active learning for that one piece, I truly believe and the research supports that those are the things that students remember in the long run. And I see this all the time in my course evaluations that students come back to, oh, that that simulation experience we did in this one class, and then they talk about it, or oh, that one case study where I had to be a legislator and I had to stand up and, and give my opinion, that was nerve racking dot dot, dot, dot, dot. And so these experiences wherever we can build them in, and you don't have to create them yourself is the other beauty right? You have to do a little research to figure out what's already out there, but with the Open Educational Resources, and with things like podcasts and news articles, right? There's a lot of research and a lot of tools out there that we can simply adapt and utilize in our classroom. And I really think that, first of all, it makes teaching more fun. But second of all, it makes your students want to be there. It makes them engaged and dynamic and excited about class. So that would kind of be my little advice is is one thing per semester because that's a reasonable tasks to take on to edit all of the work that we do as professors.
One thing per semester, all directed a little bit towards having more fun in the classroom and getting students to have memorable experiences. Dr. Kerri Evans, thank you again, so much for agreeing to take the time to talk to us today. I learned a lot and I hope that our listeners did too. And I really look forward to playing a really cool board game in the near future.
Once again, it's time for Campus Connections, the part of the podcast where we connect today's featured topic to other research happening on UMBC's campus. Today, our intrepid production assistant Sophia is going to tell us a bit more about the work of UMBC's is Faculty Development Center, which supports SoTL research in the social sciences just like Dr. Evans' project, Sophia, what the heck is SoTL?
SoTL, aka the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, is an academic field that attempts to maximize the effectiveness of teaching. This typically involves a systematic inquiry into classroom methods, often undertaken by teachers themselves to reflect on the impact of various teaching strategies. In other words, it's self evaluative research conducted by teachers to further the education of their students. At UMBC the Faculty Development Center sponsors a SoTL discussion group that covers many topics in the field, including techniques, research designs, project ideas, and topical literature. Although the FDC has "faculty" in the name, the SoTL group is open to anyone who wants to attend. Meetings usually center around a discussion of texts or empirical research articles, but can also feature presentations by UMBC faculty members who are currently conducting research in the field. This not only gives attendees an insight into the process and methods behind such research, but the opportunity to provide feedback in a supportive scholarly environment. However, SoTL research isn't only recognized within its field, a research project by Drs. Diana Alonso, Eileen O'Brien and Anne Brodsky, three professors in UMBC's Psychology Department was the recipient of the Hrabowski Innovation Fund award in the spring of 2020. The award provides funding for research that focuses on facilitating undergraduate success, a definition which applies perfectly to the work of Drs. Alonso, O'Brien, and Brodsky. The project titled "Synchronous IRL/DL Technologies for Innovative Teaching" is a cross collaboration between UMBC's main and Shady Grove campuses in an effort to make psychology courses accessible to more students. Psychology is one of the largest undergraduate programs at UMBC, and the team wanted to ensure that every student had the chance to take the classes they needed. Seeking to increase the impact and availability of psychology classes, the team offers PSYC 335, a required course called Physiological Psychology, as a fully online cross campus course during the summer of 2020. Although online classes are nothing new to us at this point, the research of the team was conceived during the earliest stages of COVID in an amazingly coincidental display of forethought. From theoretical discussions to real world implementation, SoTL help students and teachers alike make the most of their time spent in the classroom. If there's one thing to take away from the field, and from the research of UMBC's incredible psychology faculty it's that teaching and learning are never mutually exclusive.
Thanks, Sophia, for that great review of UMBC's fantastic resources for SoTL researchers. And thank you listeners for spending time with us today. And as always, keep playing board games. I mean, keep questioning.
Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Jefferson Rivas. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent UMBC events. Until next time, keep questioning
