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This paper describes the design and investigation of a high-school-affiliated esports program based on an enrichment learning model. In it, the authors detail the connections between esports and learning, self-reported impacts of the program and demographic differences among them, students' attitudes toward program features, and equity in results across demographic groups. Several methods over four years were used to document and evaluate the program including observational fieldwork, an online retrospective posttest survey, and a modified instrument given in an alternative one-sample pretest-posttest design. Authors find compelling evidence that an enrichment approach to youth esports yields positive outcomes in communication, social-emotional skills, and school affiliation. There are also indications that this approach temporarily staved off an overall downward trend in key variables including STEM interest, self-regulation, attendance, and GPA, during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Providing guidance to learners navigating a game-based learning environment requires walking a fine line between encouraging progression toward learning goals without disrupting playful engagement in the game. In this paper, we present a scaffolding guidebook developed for tutors to provide guidance in game-based learning environments that encourages exploration of the problem space and solving puzzles without disrupting engagement. Scaffolding strategies were coded and categorized from Baba is You gameplay recordings of 13 middle school and 12 undergraduate students and then situated based on guiding principles from relevant literature into a scaffolding guide. Here, we describe this guidebook and its development, which could provide educators with important tools that can help their students progress through game-based learning environments without interfering with engagement.

It has been widely argued that journal metrics are used in assessing publication records on resumes for academic jobs and assessments. Within that debate, two important considerations emerge. Firstly, academics belonging to different career cohorts may have different experiences which are reflected in their recommendations related to targeting and assessing publication records. Secondly, recruitment or assessment expectations that include publishing in highly rated journals may lead to the targeting of a smaller number of high rated publications, with perceived lower rated journal outlets being discouraged. Using an experimental design, an online survey collected data from 1011 academics across management and psychology disciplines in the UK and USA, exploring the association between journal ratings, the number of publications on a resume, and the length of time spent in academia. Analysis indicated that when assessing an academic resume, the discouraging of lower rated journal publications may be dependent on the length of time spent in academia. Specifically, in the context of exactly the same high rated journal publications on a resume, those who had been in academia for 10-20 years were less favorable towards the inclusion of additional low rated journals. The findings contribute to how we view the socialization of institutional influences on career decision making in higher education. The results add to emergent evidence of behavioral responses to the institutional pressures on academic careers, and how individuals at different career stages may be impacted differently. This has implications for the management of academic career progression and academic recruitment processes.

Video games are failure-rich spaces that provide a unique lensinto how individuals react to failure in challengingenvironments. In this study, we utilize Cuphead, a notoriouslychallenging video game to demonstrate a unique behaviorallydriven approach to understanding how an individual reacts tofailure. Using measures of mastery orientation and data-drivenretrospective interviews, we show that individuals who exhibitmore mastery-oriented behaviors and more mastery-orientedbehaviors before a helpless-behavior are more likely to show ahigher game mastery orientation score, and that individuals thatabandon a level before completion are more likely to show alower game mastery orientation score. This introduces videogames as a fruitful environment for understanding masteryorientation, a behaviorally driven approach to understandinghow individuals react to failure, and provides a glimpse intohow individuals react to failure in a challenging video game.

How players react to failure remains an understudied area of games research. Previous work has shown that mastery orientation can effectively gauge how players will behave in response to failure in a video game. This study shows that after playing a challenging video game for two weeks, women who initially scored lower on this scale significantly increased, while men significantly decreased. No differences were found regarding how much they played, how often they failed, or their reactions to in-game failure. This suggests that this change is not rooted in their behavior, but in their perceptions of their ability to persist in these environments. These perceptions may have been influenced by well-documented stereotype biases that women and other individuals face entering video game communities. While this doesn't address the root cause, it suggests that the perception of their ability to persist through challenging games can change with exposure, relieving these held biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]