Development of an emotion regulation serious game for educators

Abstract

Educational demands necessitate an emotionally intelligent workforce, and evidence indicates that teachers’ EI contributes to professional efficiency and learner outcomes. However, there is a paucity of EI teacher training interventions and research. This research is the first of two studies with the long term aim of developing and validating an intervention that potentially contributes to the need to foster teachers’ Emotional Intelligence (EI) from an adult learning perspective. In this study, I conceptually developed an Emotion Regulation (ER) serious game by applying a pragmatic Developmental Research (DR) approach. This is favoured for generating theoretical and practical solutions to complex educational problems. Through iterative cycles of reviews, analysis, design and evaluations, I generated two sets of heuristics. I firstly generated procedural heuristics, which provided procedural activities to develop my envisaged intervention. Guided by my DR procedural framework, I researched theoretical and practical sources of information to conceptually design my first ER serious game prototype. These involved reviews of (1) Adult Learning Theory (ALT); (2) EI from a psychological perspective, narrowed down to (3) The theory of ER; and (4) Serious game design strategies. These also involved an analysis of (5) The particular contextualised ER needs of the end user. From these sources, I secondly generated an evolving set of substantive heuristics, which provided the essential design characteristics of the intervention itself. I reflected on and formatively evaluated the evolving procedural and substantive heuristics generated. I furthermore provided recommendations for future research on the basis of the constraints experienced in this study.