Celso Gonçalves - Appropriation and Authenticity: A didactic study of the learning experience of students engaged in a serious game on Epidemiology and Biostatistics

This thesis focuses on the relation between a subject and an object. Specifically, it deals with the learning experience of university students for the serious game Laboratorium of Epidemiology (LOE). It basically concerns the modelling of learning phenomena in the didactics of mathematics—appropriation and authenticity. This study will be a multidisciplinary one that covers the fields of psychology of education, didactics of mathematics, and technology-enhanced learning.

As a part of this thesis, a field experiment was conducted in a class of biostatistics, in which LOE was implemented in an ecological and permanent manner. The research problem concerns the phenomena of appropriation and authenticity, which are formalized and illustrated and supported by Brousseau’s Theory Didactical of the Situations.

The tracks of activity, verbal interactions, and direct interviews were analysed over a three-year period during which the LOE game was used. This study allowed the construction of concepts such as ‘role appropriation’ by students in the context of a serious game; ‘appropriation of problems’ by students, whether individually through interactions with the object (game) or by collaboratively seeking a solution to the problems; and ‘the perception of the authenticity’ of the game.

Through this approach, this thesis shows how appropriation and authenticity ensues from the interaction between individuals and objects. Appropriation is an element of the learning experience from which individuals make their own learning objects in an active process of transformational development, in which individuals reconstruct an object that they appropriate in their own away. In the proposed model, the process is established using categories that are not necessarily consecutive: accept, make choices, anticipate, and master. The perception of the authenticity of a serious game by an individual is favoured by the attributes of an information technology environment owing to the impact such attributes have on individuals. The authenticity of an IT environment is defined as a compromise among three elementary dimensions: realism, internal coherence, and didactic relevance.

A better understanding of these phenomena on the basis of the learning process will contribute to future studies on the quality of teaching and on the design of new tools, especially those based on role-playing and immersion.