Information literacy is the ability to find, process and analyze and evaluate information. Information literacy is an essential skill in the 21st century, it’s a soft skill students need to develop to become productive members of society (Christe, Mathur, Lee, Mazur, Badurek, Bhatt & Morton, 2016). Schools today don’t have an effective resource or tool to teach students information literacy skills. Informaiton literacy is not apart of the Ontario curriculum, therefore there is no priority to explicitly instruct students. Informaiton literacy is more than identifying the need for information and locating it but rather requires critical thinking to determine if the information is relevant and creditable.

How does game-based learning support student’s acquisition of information literacy? When students play educational games, students learn by actively participating, they learn by doing. Students are intrinsically motivated through a relevant teaching tool – video games. Information is power, is a common phrase in North America. It rings true in this module as I explored how information is a form of currency (Latham & Hollister, 2013).

Human behaviour is affected by how individuals seek and use information – there are many theories that explain the phases of human behaviour that begin informaiton seeking to finally verify informaiton. According to Robson & Robinson (2013), there are factors that affect informaiton behaviour – context, demographics, expertise, psychological, needs and wants. Within the context of a video, players gather information and process it based on their experiences and perspectives. Players will perceive a game and its meanings differently based on these factors. How a player reacts and responds to the information in a game will also be affected by these factors.

There are many factors that game developers use to motivate players to continue to interact and engage through the digital game medium. Various types of immersion, narratives, interactions, events, sensory stimulus, rewards and challenges. There is an opportunity for educational games to support student learning through game development with curriculum content. When students engage in digital gameplay they are immersed in the narrative and mechanics of the game. The medium lends itself to students gathering information through gameplay and critically thinking about it before responding to the game. Students not only learn the specific learning outcome of curriculum content but foster information literacy skills.

References

Christe, D., Mathur, R., Lee, S., Mazur, K.,  Badurek, C., Bhatt, J. & Morton, M. (2016). A game-based learning approach to information literacy. Knovel Global Academic Challenge, Elsevier.

Latham, D., & Hollister, J. M. (2013). The games people play: Information and media literacies in the Hunger Games trilogy. Children’s Literature in Education, 45(1), 33–46. doi:10.1007/s10583-013-9200-0

Robson, A. & Robinson, L. (2013). Building on models of information behaviour: linking information seeking and communication. Journal of Documentation, 69(2), 169–193. doi:10.1108/00220411311300039