What It Is

Legislative Aide is a computer based game that integrates service learning and computer gaming with Youth Map’s social networking capabilities. The software and curriculum are based on research done at the University of Wisconsin Center for Communication and Democracy, and was developed by two companies, Community Knowledgebase, LLC and EFGames, LLC, in partnership with CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

Legislative Aide is designed to help students in exploring their community, its resources, and their role in civic life. With Legislative Aide, students work in small groups to play legislative aides to a simulated elected official. As a part of the game, players conduct one-on-one interviews with real-life members of their community. Then, within the context of Legislative Aide, players use Youth Map in order to see how resources and information are linked within the community.

How It’s Used

Within the game, students take on the role as a legislative aide to a virtual elected official; through working with their peers, teacher, and characters within the game, students gain new insight into local issues that affect their constituents, and they learn how to research these issues and ultimately propose solutions. Legislative Aide has activities and materials that meet the learning objectives of American government classes while also helping students develop civic skills and learn about the importance of civic participation.

To play Legislative Aide in a classroom, each student needs access to a computer with a standard Web browser and an Internet connection. While it is possible to play parts of the game with students sharing a computer, the game has been designed with most activities requiring each student have his or her own computer.

Here’s how the game works. When students first log in to the Legislative Aide game online portal, they are welcomed by the virtual district office manager. This is one of several nonplayer characters within the game that help guide students in performing their legislative aide duties. These nonplayer characters are mostly automated, but teachers can manage them, too. In this way, students’ learning is scaffolded and they receive just-in-time feedback on their performance.

Throughout the game, players receive emails from nonplayer characters. These messages are from their legislator’s district office manager and assistant office manager that direct them to perform certain tasks. In order to simulate what happens within a real legislative office, students can also reply to these emails, to which teachers can then respond as well. It’s important to note that these emails are only exchanged within the game portal, and students cannot send or receive messages to or from outside of the game. As student collect and analyze their data, they engage in various writing activities as well.

Before conducting interviews with real-life community members, students work in small groups to generate a list of questions. Then during the interviews themselves, students take notes; these notes are entered into the Youth Map tool so they can be easily referenced later on. These interviews are critical in allowing students to explore local resources and connect with key community members; through using Youth Map, students can then visualize the links between people, resources, and pressing issues within their community.

Towards the end of the game, students will collaborate with their peers to write a press release about their findings. The culminating activity will involve creating an action plan where they need to synthesize their research, create a plan to address key issues of concern, and support their recommendations with multiple data sources. Teachers are provided with rubrics to help them assess students on both the process and the products that happen within Legislative Aide over the 23 class periods that it runs. This way, teachers can provide students with timely feedback on their performance of tasks as well as on their final products.

In taking on the role of a legislative aide, students are able to develop the cognitive skills and communicative skills of a professional. But because the game doesn’t overwhelm students with too much information and too many tasks all at once, their learning is effectively scaffolded. Through playing Legislative Aide and using the Youth Map tool, students can visualize the links between individuals, organizations, and problems within their community - and in the end, this process is what makes service learning real, tangible, and meaningful.

Research Design

Currently, we are conducting a functionality and outcome trial of the intervention in schools in Tampa, Florida. Volunteer teachers have been randomly assigned to two groups. The first group used the intervention in February and March 2009; the second group will serve as a control group during that time. Both groups will take the pre/post test at the beginning of February and the end of March. The original control group will use the intervention in April and May 2009, and the original treatment group will serve as a second control group.

All classrooms will conduct pre/post tests at the end of May. (The pre/post test administered at the end of March will serve as the pretest for both groups in this second test.) In this way, each classroom will serve as both a treatment and a control group (at different times), which increases the statistical power of the study. As part of this study, we will also conduct classroom observations and focus group interviews with selected teachers.

We are focusing our research in three key areas:

Change in civic understanding and motivation. We will document change in civic understanding and motivation to engage in service by analyzing change on pre-post items that includes a bank of civic knowledge and motivation items developed by Joe Kahne at Mills College.

Teacher response to the intervention. We will analyze teacher responses to daily ratings of the curriculum included in the software, and perform a qualitative analysis of teacher responses in focus groups.

Student response to the intervention. We will analyze student responses to the intervention through classroom observations, by analyzing questions about the intervention that are included in the post interview, and by analyzing teacher’s ratings of student enjoyment and engagement collected daily by the software.

Research Findings

Youth Map and Legislative Aide build on the concept of epistemic games (Shaffer, 2006) which recognizes that computers now are able to do more than simply drill or tutor students. They now can “make models that work the way some part of the world does” (p. 9).

Epistemic games take advantage of these new capacities to teach the knowledge, skills, identities, and values that adult professionals use when they learn how to become graphic artists (Shaffer, 1997), bio-engineers, architects, and journalists. Youth Map models the complex skills of civic professionals while recognizing that the skills of citizenship go well beyond professional skills (Sirianni & Friedland, 2001).

Legislative Aide will model each of these skills of citizenship by bringing them into the classroom and then connecting students to the civic world outside. Using skills that are drawn from the working world of civic professionals and citizens, students practice these skills in ways that allow them to build civic skills, knowledge, identities, and values. Each of these skills will be developed through using Legislative Aide.

Currently, we are in the process of researching the use of Legislative Aide - and its social networking platform, Youth Map - in diverse public school settings. Our hypothesis is that Legislative Aide leads both directly and indirectly to service learning in classrooms.

First, as students address a problem over the course of the curriculum, we hypothesize that students’ understanding of that problem will increase in multiple dimensions. They will be come familiar with many aspects of the problem that were almost certainly unfamiliar as well as the connections among these issues. They will gain a richer knowledge of the network of community institutions engaged in addressing that problem. And they will become directly knowledgeable through active discovery of the repertoire that local institutions and citizens are using to address it.

Second, we expect that students’ motivations to engage in community service generally, and on the problem they have worked on, will significantly increase, leading as Kahne and Sporte have shown to increased likelihood of civic engagement after high school.

Third, the students’ presentation of their work to the larger community, either through face-to-face meetings or web publication, is itself a form of service that both produces goods of public value and visibly and directly increases the civic engagement of young people in the local community.

Fourth, a final module will offer a series of steps for teachers and students who want to continue doing direct service on the problem they have explored as school based service or individual voluntary action