Education for sustainable development through business simulation games: An exploratory study of sustainability gamification and its effects on students' learning outcomes

By Lucia Gatti, Markus Ulrich, Peter Seele. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Education for sustainable development (ESD) is gaining increased attention in tertiary education. According to the literature, ESD affects not only the content of education, but also its process and outcomes. This requires a new learning culture based on participative processes and new teaching techniques. Among the different methods and techniques as typologized by Figueiro and Raufflet (2015), action and experiential learning methods offer a promising approach for teaching sustainability. However, no previous studies have empirically addressed the effects of this approach on sustainability learning outcomes. For this reason, with the objective of understanding the potentials and limitations of such methodology, this paper presents an exploratory study of a teaching experience based on the action and experiential learning approach, and in particular on the simulation game technique. A pre-game and post-game survey were developed to evaluate the students' learning experience of a business game focused on sustainability (napuro). The study was carried out at two universities in Switzerland. The results suggest that the action learning approach, and in particular, simulation and gaming, may successfully generate cognitive and affective learning outcomes which in turn may affect students' development of critical thinking skills. In addition, the study suggests the central role of motivation in influencing students' learning outcomes. The game seems to be more effective in influencing the student's expertise in the subject and their attitudes toward sustainability when the student records a high level of motivation to attend the course and interest in the subject before the game.

Subfields: Education, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a51ab83b4c148a5f6159263dc68eed41aa9355c

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1. Stamatios Papadakis
2. Alkinoos-Ioannis Zourmpakis
3. Michail Kalogiannakis

Citations in the corpus

• Between Level Up and Game Over: A Systematic Literature Review of Gamification in Education (2021, background): “These results may be due to the fact that the game elements have a positive influence on the motivation and participation of the students, improving their civic attitude and respect for the environment [27].”
• Gamification in Science Education. A Systematic Review of the Literature (2021, background): “Many researchers have highlighted the need to understand the connection in gamification between theory, gaming elements, and learning outcomes [3,82,93,94].”