The perennial question in our industry is about pay off. It’s sensible for clients to want an indication that their investment in simulation games will result in learning, new desired behaviors, and ultimately bottom-line success. It’s a tough question to answer for any learning program, but because simulations tend to look less like the formal education we’ve accepted culturally as “correct”, my experience is they receive extra scrutiny.
Fortunately this scrutiny has resulted in a growing body of academic research which is gradually but effectively building the case for simulation based learning. In 2006, Jennifer Vogel and her colleagues at the University of Central Florida undertook a meta-analysis of published research on simulation based learning. For one of my ‘Share’ pieces at ExperiencePoint, I built a quick summary of the key findings of this study.
