World of Warcraft usually gets blamed for bad grades, not praised for contributing to the educational process.

But LiveScience reports that the use of online games - including WoW - is getting new attention from proponents of the unschooling movement. By way of example, University of Wisconsin-Madison educational researcher Constance Steinkuehler organized an after-school group in which boys gather to play WoW:

Some of the eighth graders and high school freshmen who signed up for the group couldn't have cared less about writing or reading in school. Yet those students have gone from barely stringing together two sentences to writing lengthy posts in their group's Web site forum, where they discuss detailed strategies for gearing up their virtual characters and figuring out tough quests...

 

The unschoolers' experiences, along with the early success of Steinkuehler's program, suggest that playing a video game set in a virtual online world can encourage students to learn valuable real-world skills. Steinkuehler's goal is to figure out when and how learning takes place in online games, and how popular games made for entertainment might become educational tools.

 

Before starting the WoW group, Steinkuehler studied forum message on Blizzard's official WoW site, and noted that 85% of the threads indicated that gamers were scientifically literate, using reasoned arguments and hypotheses supported by facts. Said Steinkuehler:

What I'm deeply invested in is reinvigorating their intellectual life. I want kids to understand that games are intellectual and about problem solving, not that different from what scientists are doing in the real world.

GP: It's not the first time we've reported on Constance Steinkuehler's MMO research. See: Study: Online Games Make You More, Not Less, Social

Thanks to: Reader Skyler Martin for the heads-up...