Mini Games for Professional Awareness in Introductory Psychology

Abstract

Introductory psychology courses in higher education usually focus on disseminating psychological theory and lack application of this knowledge to the practical context of work. We expect a game-based approach to support more active and experiential learning, and develop a series of mini-games to increase awareness of study specialisations and careers in psychology. This short 'work in progress' paper first describes the instructional design of these mini-games that provide our psychology students with more authentic, rich and active learning environments. We then describe our research design with some preliminary findings. We administered questionnaires before and after gameplay and collected logging data on gameplay. Participants were allocated randomly to four experimental groups that used variants of the games, differing in assignment order (fixed or free, so more active) and number of sources (one or more per assignment, so richer). At the time of submitting this paper, 12 mini-games are available that have been studied by 80 students (complete datasets). Preliminary results show a positive treatment effect of gameplay on professional awareness, as indicated by a 12% knowledge increase about work practice. Students evaluate the gameplay (authenticity, usability, flow) and setup of game content (learnability) as 'more than sufficient' to 'good'. Some between-groups differences within the 2x2 game variants were found. For instance, a fixed order of assignments was found to produce more efficient learning, and the provision of more sources was found to increase feelings of authentic learning. Between-group comparisons did not reveal significant differences on other dependent variables studied (like motivation, flow, usability, learnability, grade).