Investigating Social Motivation in an Educational Game for Acquiring Intercultural Skills Thesis Proposal

Games are increasingly being adapted for use as educational tools. One relatively new use of games is to facilitate learning social or interpersonal skills such as conflict resolution by simulating human behavior with virtual characters. My work investigates students' social goals to understand how they help motivate students to acquire cultural understanding in BiLAT, one such system designed to teach cross-cultural negotiation skills. In previous work, I hypothesized that students who were given explicit social goals (e.g., “Come to understand your partner’s point of view”) would be more successful in learning from the game than students who were given task-focused goals only. The results did not confirm our hypothesis – the group without the explicit (externally-imposed) social goal learned more according to most measures. However, on further investigation, students who reported having social goals in a manipulation check, regardless of whether they were externally imposed, seemed to learn the most. These results combined with my other preliminary work suggest that social goals and interactions are important in learning cultural negotiation, but that setting explicit social goals may not be the right scaffold. In this proposal, I outline a program of research to understand the role of integrative and self-assertive social goals in learning cultural negotiation and how to promote them. First, I will implicitly manipulate students' goals in a culturally-situated game to determine how social goals affect learning. Second, I will develop a model of how social goals are influenced by and interact with learner characteristics such as social intelligence and personality traits. These two strands will results in the development of an in-game intervention that will implicitly scaffold social goals that are beneficial to learning intercultural competence. This work will contribute to the literature on learning sciences, virtual environments, and intercultural competence to provide a better understanding of how people interact socially with virtual humans in a cultural learning context.