Development and evaluation of an escape room based on general pharmacokinetics: Students' perceptions of its motivational climate

Abstract

We designed an escape room based on the basic principles of pharmacokinetics for undergraduate bachelor students and explored its effect on students' perceived motivational climate and usefulness as a formative assessment via a mixed-method design. The effect on students' perceptions of the motivational climate was measured using pre- and post-test measurements of the MUSIC® inventory. Students' experiences with the escape room and suggestions for improvement were collected by open-ended survey questions. Forty-one students initially joined the study while 28 students completed both the pre- and post-test MUSIC® inventory. Data from the MUSIC® inventory revealed the effect of playing the escape room on students' situational interest was positive with medium to large effect (Cohen's d_av = 0.63). Data from the open-ended questions confirmed the outcome of the MUSIC® inventory. While there was a positive effect on situational interest, students found the escape room not very useful as a tool for formative assessment. Further research should include a control group and focus on the effect of the escape room on academic success and work toward increasing the capacity of the escape room for large-scale courses.

Keywords: escape room; mixed-method design; motivational climate; pharmacokinetics; undergraduate.

FIGURE 1

General overview of the flowchart of the pharmacokinetics escape room. Numbers refer to the tasks and descriptions of Table 1.

FIGURE 2

An example puzzle that students encountered while playing the escape room.

FIGURE 3

Pre‐ and post‐measures (average score (SD)) of the MUSIC® inventory. Significancy between pre‐ and post‐test data of the intervention group tested by two‐tailed paired t‐test. **p < .001.