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This chapter examines how learning experiences acquired from video games are transferred across the dimensions of content and context. It first considers the debate over the transferability of learning before discussing the effects of learning content on transfer, along with the effects of context on learning and transfer. It also reviews the evidence for successful transfer of learning from video games to a far context.

This chapter focuses on the transfer of learning from video game play to the classroom. It begins with an overview of transfer and how it takes place before turning to a discussion of video games as learning environments. It then considers video game features that have the potential to foster motivation and self-efficacy, support learning, teach transfer, and enhance mindfulness, self-monitoring, metacognition, and problem-solving skills.

This chapter examines the General Learning Model (GLM) and how it can be used to unveil the potential of video games as a teaching tool in the classroom setting. It first provides an overview of domain-specific learning theories, with particular emphasis on habituation and discrimination, classical (respondent) conditioning, operant conditioning, observational learning, cognitive learning, and emotional learning. It then turns to a discussion of the GLM and its short-term and long-term models of learning, as well as how video games allow generalization and transfer of learning. Finally, the chapter considers the impact of games on learning and education.

Just as we often hear the unsupported claim that any kid could have made a work of abstract expressionism, we also often hear the claim (equally unsupported) that arts education makes our kids smarter. This is a claim about alleged transfer of learning from the arts to a non-arts outcome. Arts-infused schools, it is said, will raise academic achievement and standardized test scores. Music lessons will raise a child’s IQ. Research discussed here tests these claims, showing that they are unsubstantiated. We will have to look elsewhere for the value of an arts education. The more likely outcomes of quality arts education are not IQ and test score improvements but rather broad habits of mind—learning to observe closely, learning to envision, learning to explore and learn from mistakes, learning to stick with something over time, and developing the habits of critique and evaluation and reflection on one’s process.

This chapter examines how children use, and learn from, multiple media, otherwise known as cross-platform learning. To this end, it presents the results of a two-part study of cross-platform learning that investigated children's use of related, multiple media platforms and assessed learning from combined use of these platforms. The study yields important insights about how learning from multiple media platforms compares to learning from a single medium, as well as how cross-platform educational media projects can be designed to build on the strengths of each medium so that the media components best complement and support each other. Two types of transfer of learning that can operate in cross-platform learning are highlighted: applying content acquired from educational media to improve performance in posttest assessment tasks and applying content acquired from one form of educational media to produce richer engagement with a second educational media platform.

This chapter focuses on video and computer games as grounding experiences for learning. More specifically, it argues that computer and video games allow players to directly experience what is being learned, which can provide depth when combined with more formal learning experiences. It first describes two video games, Civilization and Control the Catapult, to explore the effects of having different historical figures interacting in the same historical events (a multiuser virtual environment) and how physical and virtual role-playing might be combined to facilitate learning. It then considers the online virtual world Second Life to find out how learning via virtual role-playing with avatars compares to physical role-playing. It also examines how video and computer games promote the transfer of learning.

This chapter explores the multidimensional relationship between computer games and education. More specifically, it considers game playing within the broader context of adolescents' orientation to and experience of schooling. It presents the results of Flemish studies that examined the role of education in structuring media use, the relationship between education and media use by different types of students, computer game playing in education, and how computer games promote the transfer of learning.