Lo sviluppo del pensiero strategico nella scuola di base: riflessionisull'uso delle TIC
Résumé
In recent years the development of skills which are not strictly associated with technical abilities or specific subject contents has become a central focus of education and the debate on how to define and promote what is usually indicated as "core" skills or "key" competencies is involving national educational Institutions and systems, especially in OECD countries. Among such skills a crucial role is assigned to strategic and reasoning abilities. While a general agreement on the importance of such skills is widely acknowledged, it is more difficult to find indications on how to develop them, especially with young children. As a matter of fact, they are not well defined, there are not consolidated methodologies to improve them, and it is also quite difficult to evaluate results and achievements. For these reasons we considered interesting and fruitful to reflect on how ICT, and, in particular, some kind of computer games, could be used to analyse and promote such abilities. The paper reports on a small-scale, long-term pilot project aimed at fostering the development of strategic and reasoning abilities in young primary school pupils by engaging them in playing with a number of computer games. Such games have been selected within a variety of products available on the market and on the web (free or shareware). The pilot has been carried out for two years with two classes of primary school (age from 8 to 10) and is currently in under development for the third year. Pupils of each class, divided in groups, have attended a computer session of an hour per week within the normal school timetable, under the direct supervision of the class teacher and of some researchers. Qualitative data have been collected by means of observation protocols and evaluation forms in order to analyse the extent of the progresses made by the pupils during the pilot and to identify specific evidenced problems and drawbacks. The research study has two main related goals. The first goal is to outline a classification of the considered computer games on the basis of the specific abilities they foster and of the kind of mediation they offer to their acquisition. The ultimate goal is to understand how pupils organise their reasoning and plan their strategies in playing with a number of games in order to delineate some common pattern and to outline possible difficulties in the performed processes. The extent and duration of the study mean that, whilst the findings are not generalizable, they do offer insights into some mechanism underpinning basic strategic and reasoning skills, and into some of the characteristics and potentialities of existing computer games that might be used productively in schools.
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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