The Evolution of Assessment: Learning about Culture from a Serious Game

In ill-defined domains, properly assessing learning is, itself, an illdefined problem. Over the last several years, the domain of interest to us has been teaching Americans about Iraqi business culture via a serious-game-based practice environment. We describe this system and the various measures we used in a series of studies to assess its ability to teach. As subsequent studies identified the limits of each measure, we selected additional measures that would let us better understand what and how people were learning, using Bloom’s revised taxonomy as a guide. We relate these and other lessons we learned in the process of refining our solution to this ill-defined problem.