Keywords

1 Introduction

Social media is a growing environment for daily socialization [1]. Post pandemic reports confirm that at least in the developed countries, people easily combine their traditional communication, education and work habits with the support of social media platforms [2]. Social media epitomizes the idyllic representation of the information society with borderless experiences of collaboration, creation and social engagement [3]. Likewise, it represents humanity’s worst nightmare and fears with misinformation and manipulation coexisting in the digital landscape [4, 5].

Social media can be an unsafe environment for children and adolescents [6]. To this respect, media literacy has been addressed as a preventive tool to raise awareness of the risks and threats present in the social media [7]. Not all media literacy interventions meet the same approach nor apply the same resources. While some interventions focus on a protective approach (i.e. monitoring children’s consumption and exposure) others promote inoculation as a way to enhance self-defense mechanisms such as critical thinking [8]. Whatever the approach is, different scholars and practitioners agree on the importance of designing educational interventions that motivate young users to observe the nuances of media and technology [9, 10]. The grounds of motivational theories offer the possibility to design pedagogical activities adapted to the new media environment and young people’s interests [11, 12].

As an advocate of critical thinking, digital literacy provides children and adolescents with a curriculum that equips them to better understand, read and use the media. It, therefore targets, designing programs that not solely tackle the reduction of social media use but also promote the inoculation of coping skills and defenses [9]. One exemplary program is the one conducted by the Courage Project, media education research focused to develop Virtual Learning Companions to educate young social media users [12]. The Courage Project encompasses different research approaches and media education initiatives. One of the key elements is the development and implementation of Narrative Scripts [13].

Narrative Scripts (NS) target the inoculation of social media awareness by focusing on training learners' critical thinking and coping skills. Among the different features that make NS a potentially effective learning resource, is the implementation of gamifying elements such as storytelling, roleplay and real case scenarios [14]. Although the narrative approach has been quite discussed in Media Education [15,16,17,18], and the related literacies (i.e. health, human rights, gender), the exploration of NS in computer situated scenarios has been discussed to a lesser extent in the current research. This study therefore aimed to analyze the effect of NS on students’ learning motivation. Specifically, we examine “how does NS affect students’ intrinsic motivation to learn about social media and enhance awareness?

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 presents our perspective of intrinsic motivation in the design of learning activities. Section 3 describes the implementation of a NS. The method and the results of the study are reported in Sects. 4 and 5, respectively.

2 Intrinsic Motivation and the Design of Learning Activities

The Courage project’s approach includes the use of a NS to teach about social media using a social media environment and all its characteristics (chat, post-like pictures, follow profiles, etc.) together with an embedded learning module where the narrative content is presented. As the recent literature shows, teenagers are highly active and engaged in social media [19, 20], but the design of learning activities, materials and a whole narrative experience to teach them needs also to be engaging. Motivational experiences emerge not from single design elements, but from the total environment-system [21].

One of our main interests was that the NS were motivating. We wanted the students to feel that they were learning in a playful way. In order to achieve this, we followed the self-determination theory (SDT), a theory to understand human motivation in general contexts. It states that human motivation is situated in a continuum between extrinsic motivation: doing something due to a superable outcome such as pressure or extrinsic rewards, and intrinsic motivation: the pursuit of an activity because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable [22]. Examples of applications that had strong components of on intrinsic motivation in their design are games with a purpose (GWAP) [23] and citizen science [24].

Although both types of motivation promote performance gains [25] intrinsic motivation has been credited for improving psychological well-being, learning outcomes, enhancing creativity and extending the quality of effort that people put into a given task [25, 26]. According to the SDT, activities that increase intrinsic motivation need to satisfy the basic human needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness [26].

Competence is related to the extent of one's own actions as the cause of desired consequences in one's environment. Direct and positive feedback is a very important factor in this aspect. Students need to see that their actions, opinions or answers matter and have an impact. Autonomy is the feeling created by a self-determined behavior rather than controlled by some external source [26]. Although some activities can be scripted, what happens inside the activities needs to give the students a feeling of real autonomy. Relatedness refers to one’s role within a social community, the belief that others value an individual and care about them.

Contexts and activities that support people’s perceptions of having agency, freedom, emotional support and connection have been shown consistently in SDT research to result in high quality, self-directed, intrinsic motivation [27]. For the design of the NS activities the three aspects of competence, autonomy and relatedness were taken into account, developing learning activities that made the students the central point of a narrative where they help to build a new social network by giving their opinion as experts and solving problematic situations presented by different characters while at the same time learning about social media concepts.

3 Narrative Scripts (NS)

The NS introduce an innovative approach towards social media education with the integration of collaborative learning elements and narrative pedagogy strategies within an educational social media platform (Table 1) [14]. As part of this pedagogical approach, students can easily interact between them as they would normally do in any social media while they receive social media guidance with the support of a virtual companion. Chatbots have been used in different pedagogical interventions showing good results in terms of engagement [28, 29]. The chatbot performs as a platform host who introduces the student to a set of social media stories deployed as challenges (missions). The main idea behind this pedagogical strategy is to create an environment where students can easily learn about social media through social media, promoting the inoculation of critical thinking and self-protection skills while observing and evaluating real social media scenarios (i.e. social media addiction, cyberbullying, profile curation). The use of NS not only gives educators the opportunity to base social media teaching/learning on social media scenarios but also to dynamically defeat the dominant viewpoints with the introduction of counter-narratives [30]. From this perspective, students are urged to play an ordinary role in social media, and genuinely interact with the NS characters to subsequently be questioned about their responses or decisions. Eventually, students are intuitively invited to play a different role or scenario.

Table 1. Pedagogical strategies in narrative scripts [14] and implementation used in the study
Full size table

There are currently four types of tasks supported by the NS. These include: free roaming inside the social network, guided roaming to complete missions visiting specific profiles, group tasks to propose the solution to a situation in a CSCL activity and playing mini-games that provide social media literacy in a dynamic/ludic way.

Free Roaming.

Uses the pedagogical strategy of social interaction: during these activities students are encouraged to roam within the social media platform and interact with preloaded content without any instructions or restrictions.

Guided Roaming.

Uses the pedagogical strategies of narrative-storytelling, scaffolding and counter-narratives: during these activities students are instructed to engage with fictional curated profiles with the aim to analyze them and reflect upon them. At the current iteration, four characters have been designed to guide students through missions to teach them about social media related concepts. The design involved the use of storytelling, the fabrication of images and videos, and the curation of character profiles (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Influencer profile, photos taken from unsplash.com and pexels.com

Full size image

Group Tasks.

Uses the pedagogical strategy of Scripting - Structuring social interaction: the current version of the NS platform supports the integration of two CSCL tools that allow students to collaborate between them (Fig. 2). These tools have been designed following the collaborative learning flow patterns of pyramid and jigsaw [33]. Specifically for the pyramid CLFP the educational platform PyramidApp was integrated. In PyramidApp [34] students help each other to solve a question in groups. The software organizes the groups equitatively and provides a web interface for the different phases (individual submission, rating phase, collaborative answer). For the jigsaw CLFP, the educational platform EthicsApp was integrated. In the EthicsApp [35] students are grouped in experts groups and are asked to reflect on a question dedicated to their role. In the first phase using the chat inside the EthicsApp the group members present their ideas. During the next phase, the jigsaw phase, the app creates groups with experts on the different pieces of information so they can share their knowledge and arrive at a conclusion on the discussed topic.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Collaborative activities PyramidApp (left) EthicsApp (center, right)

Full size image

Mini-games.

Uses the pedagogical strategy of scaffolding: a set of mini-games is also implemented within the platform to provide students with a refreshing view of the missions at the end of NS. Figure 3 exemplifies the interface of some of the minigames for the topics of social media addiction, cyberbullying and digital footprint (Fig. 3). Contrary to the traditional teaching approach, the use of minigames is aimed to reinforce students’ learning by engaging them in the evaluation of scenarios and the application of concepts rather than instruction or memorization of concepts.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Example of minigames implemented

Full size image

All currently prepared tasks (four) produce outcomes that adapt learners' experience [30]. For example, during roaming tasks students leave a footprint of their preferred influencers which feeds their dominant narrative. This data is collected and later used by the system to offer the user a different experience, to target the dominant viewpoints by offering a counternarrative (also provided by the learning materials). Moreover, data related to the students' engagement during the activities is also generated. Variables like the answer text, response times, progress and participation in the collaborative activities could be used to measure the students' engagement and provide more levels of personalization to the NS.

To conclude, the different elements of the NS have been carefully designed to promote the three aspects of competence, autonomy and relatedness to the learners. To assess to what extent this has been achieved, this study aims to analyze the narrative scripts’ effect on students’ motivation in the context of social media.

4 Method

4.1 Study Design and Participants

We designed a descriptive exploratory study to analyze how NS affects students’ motivation to learn about social media. This study utilizes data gathered during a Media Literacy intervention in a high school from Barcelona during the first term of 2022. The analyzed sample consists of 124 participants (n = 124; 67 male, 53 female, and 4 undefined; Ages 15 to 19, mean age = 16.8, SD = 1.14). The data was collected during the fourth session of a 6-day workshop conducted in a regular class schedule at students’ ordinary classrooms. As part of the research protocol, participants and their families were informed about the purpose of Courage Media Literacy workshops and consented to participate by signing an information sheet.

4.2 Instruments and Measurements

To measure the effect of NS on students' learning motivation, this study supported a mixed method approach based on quantitative and qualitative measurement.

As part of the quantitative measurement, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) was employed [36]. The IMI is a multidimensional measurement device intended to assess participants' subjective experience related to a target activity in laboratory experiments. It has been used in several experiments related to intrinsic motivation and self-regulation (e.g., [37,38,39,40,41,42]). The instrument assesses participants interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, perceived choice, felt pressure and tension while performing a given activity, creating four subscale scores. (Table 2).

Table 2. Intrinsic Motivation items observed in the present study
Full size table

The interest/enjoyment subscale is considered the most representative self-report measure of intrinsic motivation. However, the perceived choice and perceived competence concepts are also theorized to be positive predictors of both self-report and behavioral measures of intrinsic motivation, and pressure/tension is theorized to be a negative predictor of intrinsic motivation.

This study considered the assessment of four dimensions to measure intrinsic motivation: interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, perceived choice, felt pressure and tension. The instrument uses a seven-point Likert scale ranging from not at all true (1) to very true (7). Additionally, a qualitative open question was used to explore students’ impressions and thoughts about the NS. Specifically, what features they enjoyed the most and what others they would change in future activities. Student's responses were exported and qualitatively coded for their analysis.

4.3 Procedure

The present study was based on a situated learning experience: a workshop scenario. Workshop learning scenarios are formal instruction approaches to genuinely produce action-research [43]; that is for researchers, the ability to observe and analyze learning experiences in the natural settings while for participants the opportunity to perform in an ordinary way [44].

During a 6-session workshop, students participated in the media literacy workshop “The Social Media of the Future” designed by experts and technicians of the COURAGE project. As part of the workshop curriculum, students revised some topics such as social media addiction, digital footprint, fear of missing out (FoMO), etc. Each session began with a quick presentation from the instructor, some free roaming time inside the platform and the narrative script task. Depending on the session, narrative scripts tasks featured one or more CSCL activities (i.e. pyramid app, jigsaw, etc.). Data concerning the evaluation of students’ motivation was collected during the fifth session as students answered the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory questionnaire and the qualitative question.

5 Results

5.1 Students’ Intrinsic Motivation

Table 3 displays the descriptive statistics for the inventory items. According to the recorded values, participant students mostly reported acceptable values of agreement by rating the educational setting (narrative scripts) as an interesting and enjoyable activity (items 1 and 2). Aligned with this, a large percentage of participants also agreed that NS promoted their self-confidence and competence (items 4, 5 and 6). Conversely, to the optimistic results of enjoyment and competence, perceived choice showed contrasting results as some participants reported, for instance, to feel like they had to do the task (item 8). Items evaluating tension (10 and 12), on the other hand, reported the lowest level of agreement.

Table 3. Reported levels of agreement for measured items
Full size table

The measurement of intrinsic motivation inventory reported the highest mean values for the variable interest/enjoyment (M = 4.4). In contrast, pressure and tension reported the lowest mean value (M = 2.52) (Figure x). Zero order correlations (see Table 4) reported positive association for Interest/Enjoyment and Perceived Competence (r = .47, p < .00); also, for Interest/Enjoyment and Perceived Choice (r = .35, p < .00). Perceived Competence was also positively associated with Perceived Choice (r = .38, p < .00). By the contrary, pressure/tension was negatively correlated with aforementioned variables. In all cases, correlations were mostly moderate.

Table 4. Zero order correlations for the operationalized inventory items
Full size table

5.2 Qualitative Analysis

A qualitative analysis of the open question identified the motivational aspects related to the use of NS to enhance social media awareness. Among these aspects, participants reported having enjoyed the tasks assigned through the NS as a way of reflecting and practicing what they have reviewed along the social media literacy module.

Consistent with this, most participants affirmed that they were satisfied with the format of the activities and would not change anything. In fact, while evaluating the teaching instruction, participants rated both the sessions and the materials as “well designed”. The collaborative activity, on its part, caused interest among the students given the context of the instruction (extracurricular activity).

Regarding the less motivational aspects, some participants brought to discussion that the topic broadened in the NS was not very novel; likewise, some other participants underlined the lack of freedom to interact with the chatbot as sometimes the interaction remained as a programmed response that does not contribute more to students’ interaction. Participants also argued that some activities should be more dynamic and less repetitive.

In general terms, the workshop was valued as a comfortable space for sharing points of view, as it allows the participants to freely express their opinions. Likewise, the participants felt motivated by the continuous evolution of the workshops; and they describe this evolution as the transition from “heavy and tedious” sessions to more dynamic and entertaining activities that generated greater interest and enjoyment. In summary, participants describe the workshop as a useful educational experience.

6 Conclusion

With an increasing importance to provide engaging educational tools to counteract the negative effects of social media, this study explored the design of the narrative scripts from a motivational approach. Results have shown that the NS can generate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. Specifically, it has shown a positive reaction from students in the areas of interest in the topic and engagement in educational activities. According to the qualitative observations, the use of NS may also contribute to improve students’ confidence to interact with the content and share their opinion. We therefore conclude that the design of the NS provides an engaging educational experience to the students.

Future work should focus on improving the interactivity of the learning experience by adjusting the chatbot answers depending on the chat with the students, add more and varied minigames and multimedia content in order to diversify the task activities and observe new ways to measure the intrinsic motivation inside NS and collaborative activities. This could be achieved by studying the traces left by the students in the software logs.