Measuring Social Identity Development in Epistemic Games

Abstract

Learning is an inherently social process and is most effective when it is situated. Situated learning is modeled in communities of practice when new members begin their initiation into the practice and begin to develop a social identity in the context of the group. Games and simulations are one way to initiate newcomers into communities of practice. This study examines pre and post survey data and chat discourse from an engineering epistemic game to determine if students develop an engineering social identity by exhibiting forms of interdependency and depersonalization. The study concludes with how examining players' epistemic frames in CSCL environments that model real-world communities of practice, like epistemic games, can aid in the development of one of the key aspects of social identity--the process of depersonalization.