1 INVESTIGATING SOCIAL MOTIVATION IN AN EDUCATIONAL GAME FOR ACQUIRING INTERCULTURAL SKILLS

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-assertiv