A Research Study via the DDO Community

[kansai]

Hi!
I am a doctoral candidate looking at vocabulary acquisition for English as a Second Language learners. I have been playing DDO since the beginning and noticed some things that might be able to inform vocabulary acquisition. I can't go into too much detail right now, but it looks interesting.
I do need a little help though...
I need to get some surveys from people who play DDO.
I am hoping that you all might be able to help me out.
The survey should only take about 15-20 minutes or so.
If you take the survey, please use DDOForum for the participant ID.
If you could also share it with friends and guildies I would really appreciate it!!
The information gathered will only be used for this study and will not be used for any other purpose.
Thank you for your help!
The survey is at:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDOForum

If you have any questions, please leave them in this thread and I'll do my best to answer everything I can.
Thank you again!

[LuKaSu]

Hi!
I am a doctoral candidate looking at vocabulary acquisition for English as a Second Language learners. I have been playing DDO since the beginning and noticed some things that might be able to inform vocabulary acquisition. I can't go into too much detail right now, but it looks interesting.
I do need a little help though...
I need to get some surveys from people who play DDO.
I am hoping that you all might be able to help me out.
The survey should only take about 15-20 minutes or so.
If you take the survey, please use DDOForum for the participant ID.
If you could also share it with friends and guildies I would really appreciate it!!
The information gathered will only be used for this study and will not be used for any other purpose.
Thank you for your help!
The survey is at:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDOForum

If you have any questions, please leave them in this thread and I'll do my best to answer everything I can.
Thank you again!

Just a grammar nitpick, vorpal "affects" a creature and it changes color. (instead of "effects" a creature)

[kansai]

Ahh, Oops. I rarely get that right. You are correct. I'll go fix it immediately. Thank you!

Just a grammar nitpick, vorpal "affects" a creature and it changes color. (instead of "effects" a creature)

[DrPsyche]

Hi @kansai,
Curious about your project topic and results. I've chosen my next topic for a linguistics report: Additionally to my DDO findings, I have a copy of the pdf research from the McMaster University e-library and link to Open Journal of Social Sciences: Game-enhanced second language vocabulary acquisition strategies: A systematic review.
I can share the source here.

[Faltout]

After going through the survey, I'm really curious how the results are going to tell you anything about vocabulary. I mean, this was a series of trivia questions about DDO. If someone has played DDO for a while, they will know them by heart. Some other people will not know which slot is the bracer slot because they never needed to. Does that mean they don't know what a bracer is?

Also, some questions were dubious. Warforged are suited to play 2 of the classes listed. Vorpal is found both in weapons AND headwear (even if it has the name "Manslayer").

The only explanation I can give is that most of the questions are irrelevant and you want to see if people that don't know anything will answer correctly the questions that are asked twice but in different wording. (like the adamantine ones)

[kansai]

Hi DrPsyche!
Thanks! I'll grab a copy of that/those papers later this afternoon.
My study has taken way longer than it should have due to, ahem... discussions, with a previous advisor. I ended up having to run it again with a second group which was time consuming and costly.
I am basically looking at vocabulary acquisition and depth of vocabulary knowledge/development in non-gamer second language participants. I isolated some terms that were unlikely to be encountered in a standard academic setting, ran a pretest/posttest series for recognition, and tracked encounters with those items.
I'm in the midst of writing it up now, so working on the blending of the qual and quan aspects of all the data.
The short version of the results were: They were able to pick up some of the vocabulary items to a moderate depth of knowledge. More at the surface level. Not as many as I had expected, but more than a non-gamer, academic-based audience would have thought based on the number of encounters. They were highly engaged and worked very collaboratively.




That looks like an interesting paper! I'm downloading it now.

Hi @kansai,
Curious about your project topic and results. I've chosen my next topic for a linguistics report: Additionally to my DDO findings, I have a copy of the pdf research from the McMaster University e-library and link to Open Journal of Social Sciences: Game-enhanced second language vocabulary acquisition strategies: A systematic review.
I can share the source here.

[kansai]

Hi Faltout!
Thanks for the question. Yeah for most of the folks you'll find here in the forums, this wouldn't work. But I choose participants from my institution that had little/no background in DDO style fantasy literature, games, movies, etc. I ran a pretest to see how many vocabulary items they recognized on my list (mixed in with a bunch of similar real words and some that were made up). If they didn't recognize any of the words I was interested in, they were eligible for the project. I choose words that were unlikely to be encountered in an academic setting, then my newly minted participants played the game in a group for a few months. I recorded the screens they were using and the room they were in. They only played when we got together a couple of times a week. (They were on the honor system that they wouldn't play outside the regular sessions. But I asked about it at the end.).

A lot of the points you brought up were a concern, but I decided not to worry about them because the meta-knowledge that you are talking about comes from lots of experience playing this game (or similar). These folks were noobs starting out at level 1. The reason for the multiple question on the same item is to determine how much they understood about the item. For example, I can show you a picture of Talbron and ask you what race he is. If you answer Warforged, you have at least a recognition level of understanding about Warforged. But if I ask about what classes are best suited for Warforged and you answer Wizard, that demonstrates that you have more than just surface knowledge about what Warforged means. If you answer Sorcerer or Paladin, you might not know that Warforged take a hit to Charisma during the build process, telling me more about your depth of knowledge of that vocabulary item. If I ask about the kind of armor he can wear, your answer would give me more information about how well you understand the concept of "Warforged" and the implications of choosing to play one.

In general, I was looking for recognition, application of knowledge (is this the right tool for the job), and associations (if you have Y then you are also aware of X, or, these types of adjectives are often used with this noun/noun phrase: e.g. Big Sale, or Opening Sale, but probably not Brown Sale)

You'll be happy to know that many people in academia agree with you, though. It has been a ridiculous challenge to try to get them to understand what a Warforged is and why this study is useful/important. The most general response is "Games aren't important for learning language." My response is along the lines of "Games are engaging and challenging in ways that most of academia is not. By looking at how people interact with one another and with the novel vocabulary found in a game like DDO, we might be able to find ways to make learning the vocabulary associated with something like engineering or literature more captivating and faster to learn." Or something along those lines.

Research in Games in Education fluctuates. Sometimes it's in vogue, sometimes not. But I hope studies like mine can show other researchers ways to look at what players are doing and find new ways to discover cool stuff.

I hope that answers your question (a least a little). Let me know, I'll be happy to tell you more. (I am tired of writing the dissertation and this is an awesome distraction. )

{quick edit: The fact that Vorpal and Manslayer are the same would be another point in that depth of knowledge thing. Also, I think Manslayer has a pretty high minimum level, right? My groups never got over about 8th level. So they (probably) wouldn't be exposed to that knowledge.

After going through the survey, I'm really curious how the results are going to tell you anything about vocabulary. I mean, this was a series of trivia questions about DDO. If someone has played DDO for a while, they will know them by heart. Some other people will not know which slot is the bracer slot because they never needed to. Does that mean they don't know what a bracer is?

Also, some questions were dubious. Warforged are suited to play 2 of the classes listed. Vorpal is found both in weapons AND headwear (even if it has the name "Manslayer").

The only explanation I can give is that most of the questions are irrelevant and you want to see if people that don't know anything will answer correctly the questions that are asked twice but in different wording. (like the adamantine ones)