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Laboratory Performance: Doping In Olympic Sports And Rio 2016 Games

The game is generating broad enthusiasm among both students and educators and in 2010 won its developers the University of Michigan Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award. In the initial Donor bout, students search the web and library databases for sources and save them using the Zotero citation management tool. In the Tagging and Rating bout, students evaluate the content and quality of their opponents’ sources including rating their credibility and relevance on a 100-point scale. Lastly, students specify a research topic and choose the best sources from the pool of everyone’s sources for a best bibliography on this topic.

The most important idea of the game was that the game would guide students through the research process on a topic assigned in a class, and that it would culminate in an actual bibliography to be used to write a specific paper. Like scaffolding for a building, the game would support the student directly in a class assignment, while also teaching research skills generally. The new game would consist of a series of narrowly focused and successive mini-games.

Table 2 describes how instructors and librarians partner to deploy BiblioBouts in the classroom. We envisioned a new information literacy game that would be a pervasive accompaniment to the online tools students use for resource discovery and management.

Bibliobouts: What’s In The Game?

The authors also raise the question of whether the second-year students in this class and whether underclassmen generally understand scholarly sources well enough to integrate them into their papers. The game puts professional research tools into students’ hands and gives them repeated practice in using these tools to find, evaluate, and select high-quality information for their papers. Students search for sources online, choose the best ones to put into play, rate and tag their opponents’ sources, and compile a best bibliography of sources for a topic of interest from a pool of all players’ sources. When the game ends, students are ready to write their papers using the high-quality bibliography, online citations, and digital full texts that are the result of game play.

Introducing students to a limited number of new research skills at a time, mini-game play would give students tools to compare their performance with their peers, repeated opportunities for skills practice, and incentives for matching the performance of the majority of their peers. Mini-game results would be incremental and cumulative, culminating in the building of a shared digital library of resources bearing game players’ ratings, keywords, and categorizations that they would use to select the best resources for their assignments. The game developers’ research suggests, however, that students may not always apply the skills that they practice while playing BiblioBouts when it comes time to write their papers. They game the system by focusing on scholarly sources while playing BiblioBouts, but their assignment bibliographies were not significantly different from those of classmates who did not play or did not complete the game. BiblioBouts is about finding sources, not necessarily understanding them, and so students may not have the reading skills or specialized disciplinary knowledge needed to actually interpret, evaluate, and deploy an academic article in their own work (Markey, Leeder, & Taylor, 2012). A team of researchers headed by Professor Karen Markey and Associate Professor Victor Rosenberg at the University of Michigan’s School of Information set out to address this issue by developing an online game that teaches university-level scholarly research skills. Bibliobouts is an online, social activity that teaches players the skills they need to research academic papers.

Giving Games The Old College Try

Although players used few BiblioBouts sources for their final papers, they now know that they can find scholarly sources by searching relevant databases available through the university library’s database portal and use Zotero to automatically generate citations and save digital full-texts. By the time the game ended, some players were already using Zotero to organize their sources for assignments in other classes. This paper describes how college students played the web-based BiblioBouts Information Literacy game, which ushers players through the library research process while they complete a research-and-writing assignment. The game teaches students basic IL skills including creating citations, judging citation completeness, assessing author expertise, assessing source relevance and credibility, judging quality, and assessing accuracy.

BiblioBouts’ collaborative and social mechanisms help students leverage their own research efforts in finding sources, evaluating their usefulness, and choosing the best sources, with their classmates’ efforts so that everyone benefits. Players benefit from receiving hands-on practice and experience with the wide range of information literacy skills that confront them during the process from conducting library research to completing writing assignments. Both quantitative and qualitative game-play data were gathered from game-play logs, game diaries, focus group interviews with student game players, and personal interviews with instructors. These data were analyzed to determine typical game-play styles, how long students played the game, and the impact of scoring on the way the students played the game and engaged in IL activities. The R&D team’s experience building an online, interactive IL game demonstrates that game design must first focus on evaluations of player behavior followed by game-system improvements that are expected to affect the desired game-play behavior. The BiblioBouts game presents an innovative method for learning IL competencies and is unique in its social, collaborative, and interactive approach to educational gaming. It is hoped that this article will encourage IL librarians to explore games and other alternative forms of IL instruction.

This study seeks to determine the effectiveness of the BiblioBouts information literacy game for improving the quality of the sources undergraduate students cite in their written papers. The authors hypothesized that the quality of the sources players cited in their papers would improve as a result of playing BiblioBouts and players would cite more scholarly sources in their final-paper bibliographies than nonplayers. About 90 percent of the sources players’ cited in their in-game bibliographies were scholarly sources. When players transitioned to their final papers, the percentage of scholarly sources they cited in their final papers dropped in half (44.6 percent); however, it surpassed the percentage (35.2 percent) of scholarly sources nonplayers cited in their final papers. The authors suggest that players put scholarly sources into play and cited them in their in-game bibliographies knowing that they would earn high scores for their actions.