Cognitive Ethnography: A Methodology for Measure and Analysis of Learning for Game Studies

This paper describes cognitive ethnography as a method of choice for game studies, multimedia learning, professional development, leisure studies, and activities where context is important. Cognitive ethnography is efficacious for these activities, as it assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings (Hutchins, 1995, 2010) with emphasis on analysis of activities as they happen in context; how they are represented; and how they are distributed and experienced in space. The methodology is described for increasing construct validity (Cook & Campbell, 1979; Campbell & Stanley, 1966) and the creation of a nomological network (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). This description of the methodology is contextualized with a study examining the literate practices of reluctant middle school readers playing video games (Dubbels, 2008). The study utilizes variables from empirical laboratory research on discourse processing (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1996) to analyze the narrative discourse of a video game as a socio-cognitive practice (Gee, 2007; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996).