In general, I think the authors’ connection of all these habits to “scientific thinking,” insofar as they related it to the sort of science taught in science class, is a little too specific. This sort of reasoning is important to hard sciences, but it’s also important to all sorts of academic fields and everyday activities, such as politics, economics, and simple decision-making. What they observed is important to far more than just science.

What I think Steinkuehler and Duncan saw, rather than “scientific” thinking, is simply what people do when they care about a topic or earnestly want to solve a problem. I firmly believe that one of the best ways to make someone learn something, or do something, is to incentivize that something such that they really want to do it or need the target skills. Video games like WoW are mostly played for leisure. Hardly anyone playing is disinterested in the game, I expect, or they’d quit. Anyone interested enough in WoW to post on the forums is probably deeply engaged with the game and wants to improve at it. The reasoning and discovery in the forums is based in this motivation.

I’ve thought about this before in relation to video games, and active leisure activities in general. I’ve played plenty of games and at one point asked myself why I enjoyed them when, essentially, they’re quite similar to work. They’re mostly on screen, they present me with problems, they entail resource management, etc. Why put effort into them when effort in other, more important tasks, tires me out? The answer, I think, is interest. I think people are generally capable of evidenced-based thinking and rational problem solving, and that they’ll gladly do those things when motivated by interest or incentive. This is why kids who hate math class can become obsessed with sports statistics.

When Steinkuehler and Duncan report that many students don’t have requisite scientific inquiry skills (p. 530), I wonder if that study was done only in the context of science class, or if the students were only asked abstract philosophical questions. My hunch is that the students would demonstrate decent reasoning skills if the researchers had observed them doing things that matter to their real lives (there is analogous issue in math reasoning, about the difference in ability that students show between everyday “street math” and academic “school math”).

I agree with the authors that video games (or any other active leisure activity) can be a great setting to view reasoning in action. People will reason about causes and topics they earnestly care about, when they have a “reason to reason.” I would urge caution about their claim that MMOs and other games can boost informal scientific literacy (540). As a video gamer, my hunch is that these games are demonstrating extant reasoning skills by leveraging genuine interest, not by teaching new reasoning skills. These skills may not translate to topics where the interest is not genuine.

Parents and teachers should be able to distinguish between good games and ineffective ones, as well as how to properly integrate such games as a part of their students’ academic diet. It is not enough for some ed-tech designers to know good practices for educational games. If those quality games are indistinguishable in the app store from lower-quality games, this barely helps the student population writ large. Perhaps there could be some sort of certification board, like the ESRB or MPAA, that could review and certify research-backed educational games?