beyond teaching: measuring the effect of eu simulations on european identity and support of the eu

Looking at role-play simulations of political decision-making in higher education through a contextual lens: A state-of-the-art

“…This gives rise to the challenge of illuminating which simulation configuration contributes to what kind of student learning and for which types of students. Following our typology of studies, we advice future research to move away from the outcome group (e.g., Elias, 2014) and move toward the multiple group (e.g., Rünz, 2015). Moving away from the outcome group could result in at least consistently investigating learning outcomes in relation to certain student characteristics, such as age, gender, prior knowledge, or personality (Richardson et al, 2012), or to even move beyond this and abundantly highlight contextual features.…”

Taking a Glimpse Into the Future by Playing?

“…They can be the named ‘multi-dimensional resource’ for combining teaching and research. Or, like Rünz argues “researchers of political simulations should broaden their perspective by addressing research questions that go beyond pedagogical goal assessment (Rünz, 2015, p. 276).” Nevertheless, designing and conducting this simulation-game seems to be even more difficult than doing so with traditional simulation-games. Furthermore, the results presented here cover this unique simulation-game, the PdG.…”

“…The didactic and pedagogical uses of simulation-games in teaching and learning are largely accepted at this point, even though some requirements – like comprehensive assessments of simulation-based learning – may not have been entirely met yet (Asal & Kratoville, 2013; Baranowski & Weir, 2015; Duke, 2000; Patranek, Corey, & Black, 1992; Rünz, 2015; Thatcher, 1990; Usherwood, 2015; Van Dyke, Declair, & Loedel, 2000; Wolfe & Crookall, 1998). Nevertheless, Guasti, Muno, and Niemann (2015) state: “so far simulations have rarely been considered as a research tool.…”

play it again, sam! teaching transferable skills through multiple repetitions of ‘simple’ simulations (with research benefits)

“…But every simulation has the potential to become a quasi-experiment (Asal et al, 2013;McBurney and White, 2009: 345-8), thus blurring the lines between research and pedagogy. The argument that these quasi-experiments can help to evaluate learning outcomes andin a European contextidentity formation has already been made (Guasti et al, 2015;Rünz, 2015). But almost any storyline can be broken down into a number of issues that lend themselves to numerical negotiations with a clearly definable ZOPA.…”