The purpose of this research was to investigate the gaming practices of freshmen undergraduate teacher education students. The study also investigated how students who play games compared to non-gamers in their interest in using specific technologies for learning, their beliefs about how technology affects their learning, their orientation towards using new technologies, and their beliefs about the role of technology in their future careers. A broader goal was to lay the groundwork for a better understanding of how current teacher education students’ gaming practices might be leveraged in efforts to introduce game-based learning and other digital technologies into K-12 education.

This study explores preservice teachers’ current and previous gaming practices, and the relationship of gaming to their preferences for learning with technology as well as their beliefs about the importance of technology in their future profession. We were not interested simply in how prior gaming experience might relate to preservice teachers’ attitudes towards using games in their own teaching, but rather in how gaming might be tied to broader attitudes towards a wide range of learning technologies. The next sections briefly review the literature on games for learning, and build a case for the importance of understanding preservice teachers’ out-of-school gaming experiences. This is followed by a review of existing studies on inservice and preservice teachers’ gaming practices and their attitudes towards using games in their own teaching, as well as two studies that investigated the relationship of gaming to broader attitudes and practices associated with learning technologies. These studies tend to explore a restricted range of gaming practices, which limits our understanding of teachers’ gaming experience and how this experience might inform their attitudes towards and comfort with technologies in their own teaching. We then move to a description of the present study, which attempted to capture a wider range of potentially relevant game-related skills and orientations among preservice teachers.