Abstract:

Introduction to Psychology courses are often considered to be theoretical and to lack practice. A game-based approach is expected to enable more active and contextualized learning. In this presentation on work in progress we argue and describe how a set of professional mini-games provide our psychology students with both practical, rich and safe learning environments as well as active engagement with study specialisations and career profiles.

In our design an overarching pedagogical scenario connects authentic cases from practice to learning activities in education, represented through scenario-based games. At the basis of that scenario lies a multi-facetted problem family that is to be analysed and treated from four main psychological perspectives, offered as specialisations in our Master program Psychology. Competences practiced through practical assignments within the games (developed are 16 mini-games that will each take 1-2 hours) are how to communicate with patients, how to conduct tests and therapies in actual practice, how to build and analyse client files, how to deal with practical dilemmas, useless information and unexpected events, amongst others. Such mini-games or practical assignments will make students play an active and explorative role in authentic professional settings, in order to grow in their professional insight and involvement. Such mini-games deal with finding out more about your values, beliefs and strengths (personal identity), or deal with finding out more about interesting study and career options, tools and networks that will make you get there (professional identity). Where cases (specialisations) show overlap, mini-games can have a collaborative or integrative nature. The results of playing mini-games are reflected in the status of the personal profile and of the dashboard (with growth parameters derived from professional competences), finally yielding an advice on most suitable study and career paths.

Besides describing the game design, our (short) paper will present the experimental research design and first findings. We used a triangulation of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative. Retention, dropout and involvement were measured and compared by collecting administrative data and logging data on study progress within the course, subsequent subscription to new courses, and by asking students to draw up a planning for their study activities for a set period of time. We have set out a questionnaire that was both surveyed with students taking the old and students taking the new version of the course (the latter including the mini-games), so that we can compare subjective findings on both courses relating to perceived enjoyability and effectiveness. Finally, we have set-up an experiment (with about 300 students participating) to collect more quantitative finding on the effectiveness of variants of developed games, that differ in the amount of active and situated learning facilitated. In the experiment, our research questions are: Does the inclusion of more active learning foster improved professional awareness?; and Does the inclusion of more situated knowledge foster improved professional awareness? At the time of the INTED19 conference, most mini-games and first findings will be available for presentation and discussion. We will concentrate our presentation on comparing findings on enabling more active learning for both courses, and for both experimental conditions.

Keywords:

Mini games for learning, professional awareness, experience psychology, pedagogical scenarios, authentic cases.