Kelvin Thompson's List: Badging Research/Writing

Well over 150 annotated resources related to digital badging in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles, blogs, news articles, white papers & reports, non -peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and more.

The editors of the list invite new contributions. The introduction notes that "the bibliography is heavy on certain theoretical perspectives and certain approaches to this topic. We intend for this to be a collaborative bibliography and welcome submissions."

Not about badging per se, this meta-analysis of research on feedback in academic contexts nevertheless has implications for digital badging implementations.

The authors identify "three major feedback questions: Where am I going? How am I going? and Where to next?"

Further, in this article "feedback is conceptualized as information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding.... Feedback thus is a 'consequence' of performance"

This "research article" is thin on methodology and high on concept, but there are some interesting bulleted findings from interviews with students, staff, and faculty *prior* to launching a badging pilot at a UK university.

A (student) paper from a "course journal" at Stanford, this is more of an explication/critique of Mozilla's Open Badges initiative than a study of any specific implementation of badging.

A concept paper by the author of an earlier sketchy study of student, faculty, staff interviews. This paper appears to be an introduction to badging for a particular discourse community (i.e., the readers of a journal on motivation and student engagement).

This posting comes from a blog documenting an implementation of badging at an Australian university in support of graduate student research skills/knowledge/practice. This particular posting documents a use case of "physical badges" (or sorts) within the context of a multiple day thesis writing workshop. Really interesting description/observations of social dynamics at play.

In this post, some interesting research data are summarized vis-a-vis "access" and "equity" in a digital badging project. However, this is one posting in an on-going series summarizing the dialogue occuring within a community of researchers surrounding the Mozilla Open Badges initiative. Linked from each posting are conference call recordings, slides, notes, and supporting resources. A treasure trove for one who wishes to go digging through "research reports in progress!" (Click the "research" tag at the bottom of the posting for more.)

A robust research study of badging (digital and physical) within the context of educational gaming implemented in a a fifth grade classroom context. An interesting feature of this study was the use of a physical leaderboard in the classroom (i.e., "public recognition" variable). Students in the group with the leaderboard scored higher on indicators of learning than the non-leaderboard group.

This case study write-up is part of the Sloan Consortium's (Sloan-C) effective practice series. In this case, the authors share some context and data on a badging implementation within the context of a New York City high school course. However, the emphasis is more on bading as a vehicle for good program design rather than on the bading implementation per se. Note: One of the co-authors of this case is Jonathan Finkelstein, CEO of Credly.com.

(just for diversity's sake and a bit of fun) A research study focused on the functional clarity of hospital identification badges (i.e., clipped to clothing) in the recognition of physicians' roles and status. There may be some interesting parallels/implications here for the design of digital badges.