[quoting Hedden, 6 Dec 98] The only known method of detecting or measuring flow is through the administration of extensive, detailed questions that reflect the eight elements (more or less) that define the flow condition or state at random intervals during the course of the activity under study (see Jones's tables). Because of its presumed transient nature, flow is measured or detected in situ. Retrospective questionnaires, although I used them in addition to the mid-play variety, do not measure flow directly; they record one's impression whether one has experienced flow, and are therefore less reliable than the mid-stream variety, whereby the question-answer activity and the target activity are temporally juxtaposed.
I have often wondered the same thing. How do you find out if somebody is in a state of flow without interrupting the state of flow? As I stated earlier, I think observing people using software is a very valuable research activity. What I have done has been to interview people after playing, and to watch people while playing the games. You get a different kind of data with each, but both have been good and useful. Granted, it is extremely time intensive, but there is much to be learned by doing it. I agree that in order to do this with a large population you need the support that a big old grant could give you. I haven't tried video taping people working in the environments, but I have often thought it would be extremely useful to do so.
Ultimately flow appeared to be of less interest than two much more important and powerful determinants of learning success in the game environment: (1) understanding what was necessary to succeed, and (2) willingness to do what was necessary to succeed. It turns out that the latter are the two most important factors determining success with ANY learning task, whether set within a "computer-based learning environment" or a traditional classroom.
That is very interesting. It may get at something that I have thought for awhile without having any real empirical evidence for, namely that flow is a noble ambition, but getting close to flow may be good enough at times. I don't mean to be flippant, but rather to say that I don't know if a person has to hit on all eight components of flow necessarily to get the advantages of the individual pieces of the flow experience. I also am not sure if you can say conclusively that an individual flow element has been attained (which gets back to Clark's point about time), though I would assume there are people on this list who could tell us that.