No abstract

Among the different kinds of incident processing centers, the service desk has highlighted with the increasing number of its adopters around the world. Nonetheless, even though it has a series of desirable features and resources, a service desk needs several procedures to survive, without which it can severely suffer with inadequate or inexistent IT service management. In order to overcome this need, the framework of best IT practices, mostly known as ITIL, has been widely implemented on such scenarios. However, its adherence by service desk operators, has not always been as friendly as it should. The main reason for this can be made evident when considering how hard is to comply with so many recommendations laid out on such framework. Additionally, the technical staff attention and worry on complying with that framework is so great that incident treatment quality can be impaired. It is exactly on that challenge, where the persuasive technique named gamification arises here as a proposal to turn hard, tense or tedious tasks, that are commonly performed on this way on service desks, into more interesting and engaging activities in a daily basis. Through game design and elements, gamification can improve the service desk operators' motivation and engaging, by making them more involved in their job and consequentely optimizing the use and adherence of ITIL recommended IT best practices. In this scenario, since the more IT best practices are adequately followed and the more incident treatment quality increases, obviously the more IT service management quality would be improved.

The literature investigating the process underlying the answers given in self-report tests for personality assessments is scarce. This study aimed to develop a protocol to investigate the response process of people who responded to a self-report instrument for personality assessment. It also sought evidence of content validity for this protocol. The protocol presented focused on grandiosity, representing the narcissistic functioning. A total of 35 people answered the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory (IDCP) and the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5). Favorable evidence was identified, indicating the proper functioning of the developed protocol, since the literature showed consistent information about it. For example, it was observed that people who scored higher in grandiosity on self-report tests were those who chose the alternatives that represented grandiosity characteristics and were also those who presented a higher baseline to consider someone as narcissistic. The protocol is expected to be replicable by other researchers who aim to verify the response strategies adopted in self-report type personality tests.

In this study, we used a survey to classify students' goal orientation towards learning -their motivation to learn -into one of the following classes: Learning (students who search intellectual growth), Performance-approximation (students who want to show their abilities and look intelligent) and Performanceavoidance (students who avoid challenges for fearing failure). The intention was to investigate how motivation characteristics influence students' perceptions and interactions towards learning. We classified students and correlated their classes with the time they dedicated studying, and their opinion about the educational resources available. The results showed significant differences in these factors, among students with different goal orientation.