Abstract:

Educational escape rooms (EERs) have emerged as an innovative pedagogical strategy that provides students interactive and engaging learning experiences through games. Reflecting on the rapid growth of this research field, we conducted a bibliometric analysis to determine the global trends and characteristics of this emerging area in education. Although a bibliometric analysis on escape rooms in education had been previously conducted, the sample size (n=32) was modest. In contrast, we performed an analysis of 363 scholarly works in the Scopus database from 2011 up until 15 June 2022, and therefore, sought to extend the previous study in mapping the landscape and evolution of EER-related research. The results revealed a steep growth in the publication trends from 2017 onwards. The United States led as the major contributing country in EER research (n=118, 32.5%) followed by Spain (n=45, 12.3%) and United Kingdom (n=23, 6.34%). In Asia, Taiwan (n=9, 2.47%) is the leading contributor for EERs; however, both Asia and Latin America continents made the least contribution (n=27, 7.43%). Out of 148 journals, Journal of Chemical Education was ranked first in publishing research in EERs. Keyword occurrences analysis using VOSviewer generated four thematic clusters: “Escape room in higher education”, “Healthcare professional education”, “Skills and issues in education” and “Collaborative educational games”. The top five most frequent keywords used in EER research were escape room, game-based learning, gamification, serious games, and higher education. Interesting research frontiers in escape rooms were leadership, augmented reality and health professions education. This paper discusses the qualitative and quantitative findings of EER research, thus underlining the importance of escape rooms in providing gamified, authentic learning experiences in the 21st century education.

Keywords:

Educational escape room, bibliometric analysis, active learning, healthcare professions education, nursing education, medical education, pharmacy education.