Evaluating the Validity of a Non-invasive Assessment Procedure

Recent developments in serious games allow for in-game adaptations to enhance the learner's current cognitive, motivational or emotional state. Providing suitable adaptations requires a valid assessment of the psycho-pedagogical constructs the game should adapt to. An explicit assessment, e.g. by questionnaires occurring repeatedly on the screen, would impair the learner's game flow. Therefore, a non-invasive and implicit assessment procedure is required. In the course of the European research project TARGET, we established an assessment procedure which is based on the interpretation of the learner's actions in the virtual environment, called Behavioural Indicators (BIs). A set of 16 BIs has been formulated to assess the learner's current emotional, motivational and clearness state. In this present work, we describe how these BIs can be validated and focus on the innovative elements of the methodological procedure, the material, experiential considerations and the statistical analysis to be applied in an empirical study.