Roll to Reflect! How youth can build social and emotional skills with tabletop role-playing games

Registration required: https://ala-events.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_s-GgNpnDRCiH9DfydHNvQw

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on youth’s stress levels and social opportunities, creating increased need for creative ways to support the development of youth’s social and emotional learning (SEL) skills. During the pandemic, Game to Grow partnered with foundry10 to evaluate the social and emotional learning that occurred in their TTRPG programs for youth. Game to Grow is a nonprofit organization that uses TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to encourage the development of five core SEL capacities in youth, while foundry10 is a philanthropic educational research organization. Both are based in Seattle, Washington.

This research talk will focus on some of the findings from this partnership, discussing how we examined video recordings from the virtual TTRPG sessions to better understand how youth collaborated, what SEL skills youth practiced and developed, and what role facilitators played in the sessions. Our analysis focused on answering two main research questions: (1) What group problem solving behaviors and SEL skills (i.e., self-regulation, perspective-taking, communication, collaboration, and imaginative play) do youth exhibit in an online TTRPG program? (2) Do group problem solving and SEL behaviors change over time?

Through a qualitative analysis process, we found that as each group progressed through the adventure, youth had opportunities to practice various SEL skills as they developed their intra-group connections and knowledge and worked to solve the problems presented in the campaign. This presentation will discuss the research approach and methodology, as well as actionable insights and next steps for both practitioners and researchers.
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Questions? Email gamert@ala.org
Registration for this webinar is free and open to anyone. This webinar will be recorded, but initial access to the recording will only be available to GameRT members. ALA membership information can be found here: http://www.ala.org/membership/joinala.