Developing A Digital Game To Foster Morality And Empathy In Adult Learning Contexts: From Theory To Design And Practice

Moral decision-making models in game environments have been increasingly reported in research. These models, however, focus on identifying affordances and goals of games and educational interventions rather than tracing the process of moral decision-making in game worlds. This dissertation study addresses this gap in the literature by presenting and discussing the design, development, and implementation of two iterations of a game-based learning tool to identify the process of moral reasoning of potential and current government workers in controlled and continuing education settings. Awareness of moral decision-making processes was hypothesized to assist learners in recognizing their biases and decision patterns, which may lead to more efficient decisions in the real workplace. This dissertation is configured using the multiple article format and consists of three studies. Chapter 2 presents a review of the literature and design case for the first iteration of the tool. Chapter 3 describes an empirical investigation that identifies the process of in-game moral decision-making of future government workers with the first iteration of the game. In Chapter 4, I present a research study that investigates how learners make moral decisions with a subsequent iteration of the tool in an instructional setting.