Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Aug 26, 2019
Date Accepted: Dec 15, 2019
Learner Analysis to Inform the Design and Development of a Serious Game for Non-Gaming Female Emerging Healthcare Pre-professionals
ABSTRACT
Background:
Seventy-five percent of healthcare practitioners are women, but half of all females do not play digital games of any kind. There is no consensus in the literature regarding optimal design elements to maximize the efficacy of serious games. In order to capitalize on the promise of serious games in healthcare education, it is important for instructional designers to understand the underlying learner values, attitudes, and beliefs that might motivate non-gaming female healthcare pre-professional students to independently choose to persistently play serious games to mastery.
Objective:
Specifically, the aim of this study sought to answer two questions. First, what values, attitudes, and beliefs contribute to the non-gaming behaviors of 12th grade female emerging healthcare pre-professionals? Second, how do the values, attitudes, and beliefs of 12th grade female emerging healthcare pre-professionals align to important design features of serious games?
Methods:
In this study, a learner analysis was conducted using semi-structured interviews with eight 12th grade college-bound health-science female students to better understand learner values, attitudes, and beliefs to inform the design and development of a serious game. These interviewees represented a diverse subset of female emerging healthcare pre-professionals who self-identified themselves as not playing games at all, not very often, or infrequently.
Results:
The findings suggest that study participants exhibited a complex fusion of desire for both Accomplishment and Affiliation. The participants were all are independent, competitive, and pro-socially oriented leaders. They thought strategically and consciously self-limited their leisure time to achieve personally meaningful long-term goals. They embraced overcoming expected failures and aimed to achieve relevant high-stakes wins in all the academic, athletic, extracurricular and leisure activities they valued while consciously avoiding what they considered to be non-goal-oriented activities.
Conclusions:
The results of this study reinforce the need for a robust learner analysis to identify the multifaceted behavioral characteristics of targeted learners prior to serious game design and development. The common characteristics of 12th grade female health-science students in this study suggest that they will choose to invest their limited leisure time playing a personally meaningful, pre-professionally authentic serious game if the collective design elements are aligned with the students’ self-conceptualization of their present or future selves.
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