Game-based collaborative decision-making training: a framework and behavior analysis for a remote collaborative decision-making skill training game using multidimensional scaffolding

Decision-making is considered an essential competence of the twenty-first century skills. Remote synchronous collaborative problem-solving has gained much attention especially for decision-making training. We designed a framework to promote decision-making training with a multidimensional scaffolding-based game, and 84 participants were recruited online to evaluate the game based on the proposed framework. The quasi-experimental study compared collaborative and individual learners’ game performance, anxiety, motivation, acceptance, behavior patterns, and perceived learning process for decision-making.

The result showed that both collaborative and individual learners had low anxiety, high motivation, and high acceptance in the multidimensional scaffolding-based online educational game; however, the collaborative team had better game performance and found the clues to be more useful for the learning process than the individual team did. Behavioral pattern analysis revealed that the high-performance collaborative team had more well-organized problem-solving and in-depth reflection.