2016 Theses Doctoral

Examining Motivational Feedback For Sensor-Free Detected Frustration Within Game-Based Learning

DeFalco, Jeanine Antoinette

Social interactions, decision-making, perceptions, and learning are all influenced by affect. Frustration, anxiety, and fear in particular can draw cognitive resources away from successful task completion, causing the learner to focus on the source of the emotion instead. Serious games offer an ideal environment to investigate how feedback influences student affect and learning outcomes, particularly when feedback is delivered via computer system detection. This dissertation discusses the results of an experiment run in September 2015 to investigate which motivational feedback condition yields the most significant correlation to positive learning gains when a computer system intelligently generates and delivers feedback based on the detection of frustration while participants played the serious video game, vMedic, a combat casualty care simulation which includes triage tasks. Of the three motivational feedback conditions examined (self-efficacy, social-identity, and control-value), the self-efficacy motivational feedback interventions yielded positive, statistically significant learning gains when compared to the social identity and control-value feedback conditions, as well as the non-motivational feedback control condition, and the no feedback control condition.