Building a game-enhanced formative assessment to gather evidence about middle school students' argumentation skills

In this paper, we describe an effort to develop and evaluate an innovative formative assessment to gather evidence about middle school students' argumentation skills. Specifically, this game-enhanced scenario-based assessment (Seaball—Semester at Sea) includes a series of argumentative reasoning activities in the context of an extended scenario wherein students debate the issue of whether junk food should be sold to students. These activities were designed around argumentation learning progressions (i.e., hypotheses about the qualitative shifts that occur as students achieve higher levels of sophistication in argumentation) which serve as a framework to determine the targeted skills, levels and activity sequences. Performance feedback is also provided in the assessment. We conducted a pilot study, aimed at examining student performance and the validity of the tasks as a measure of argumentation skills. More than 100 middle school students completed this assessment and additional external measures of argumentation in a pre/post design. Descriptive statistics of student performance in the activities, analyses of item difficulty, and correlations are reported. Results indicated that students' total scores were significantly correlated with external measures of argumentation skills, and with students' state reading and writing test scores. In addition, students achieved higher average scores in a post-test of argumentation skills after having completed the Seaball activities. Finally, explanatory feedback about students' task performance was found to be beneficial to those who were "Below" or "Approaching" proficient on the state reading and writing test. We conclude with implications for assessment design and instruction in argumentation.