DATA ANALYTICS AND PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGY TO PROMOTE STUDENTS’ ENGAGEMENT AND LEARNING

The use of interactive systems and internet technology nowadays enhance the process of learning as they allow educational resources to be effectively distributed and delivered to students. This gives students the opportunity to learn at their own pace and convenience. Hence, universities employ these computing technologies to aid in teaching and learning in order to meet the needs of diverse learners. Thus, students could engage in learning activities at any time and even outside the four walls of universities. Despite the usefulness of these systems, students find it hard to engage for a long time with these learning resources. They are distracted by so many activities such as chatting, playing games, listening to music, watching movies, etc. As a result, a wide gap exists in academic performance between successful students and unsuccessful one (those that drop out of universities). Therefore, there is a need for research on how to increase students’ motivation to learn. The level of motivation of students to learn and progress in their education determine the length of time they spend on learning-related activities. This research investigated the use of persuasive technology in encouraging students to spend quality time in their learning resources. Persuasive technology describes computer applications which change users’ behaviour or opinion without using coercion or deception. Specifically, this research examined the effect of three social influence strategies of persuasive technology (social comparison, social learning, and competition) on students’ engagement in their learning activities. Socially-oriented strategies recognize the fact that humans are socially-driven and thus, our feeling, behaviour or opinion is affected by that of others (social influence). The strategies were operationalized in a persuasive system as three versions of visualization using students’ assessment grades. The persuasive system was applied to a real university course-based setting to determine its effect on students’ engagement in their learning activities. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in determining the effectiveness of the persuasive system versions implementing the three strategies in motivating the students to engage actively in learning activities. The results of this research show that the three socially-oriented strategies of persuasive technology employed can be used in educational software to influence students to achieve a positive goal in their learning. Precisely, the persuasive system attracted and motivated students to spend more time in their learning activities

PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGY AND GAMIFICATION AT THE WORKPLACE: ENGAGING EMPLOYEES IN EFFECTIVE DOCUMENTATION OF ANALYSIS AND EVALUATIONS

The availability of rich and high-quality data gives organizations the opportunity to make strategic decisions and a competitive edge over their competitors. However, documentation has been known to be a repetitive and tedious task and employees who perform this task may not be inherently motivated and suffer from fatigue, which reflects poorly on the quantity and quality of documentation. This thesis addresses this problem and proposes to use Persuasive Technology and Gamification to engage employees in documentation. Persuasive technology aims to change behaviours and attitudes through the art of persuasion without the use of coercion. Gamification is a type of Persuasive Technology that leverages the persuasive power of games to cause behaviour change in people. A lot of existing research and practice have focused on using Persuasive Technology and Gamification to achieve workplace engagement, motivation and productivity. However, there is little research on the use of Persuasive Technology and Gamification to engage employees in effective documentation of analysis and evaluations. This research aims to fill this gap and explore the feasibility of leveraging Persuasive Technology to encourage employees in documentation of analysis and evaluations. A Requirement-Focused Design Science Research approach was adopted to define requirements for the implementation of a persuasive gamified system to encourage employees in documentation of analysis and evaluations. Two studies were conducted to investigate employee motivation and the susceptibility of employees to various persuasive strategies. The first study was conducted among 20 Applied Behaviour Analysis front-line staff. ABA is data driven, however, front-line staff do not provide sufficiently rich data which is a critical part of the success of ABA. The second study was carried among 55 Graduate Assistants (markers) from the University of Saskatchewan. Providing feedback on assignments is a quintessential part of the learning cycle of students and the availability of feedback that students can understand and execute is required. However, students find feedbacks provided to them often vague, insufficient, or difficult to comprehend. Especially, in the second study, the results depicted a workforce whose engagement in tasks was not self-determined and a description of a perceived low satisfaction of Basic Psychological Needs; Competence, Relatedness and Autonomy. This presents a workforce that will engage in the minimum amount of work required of them without an extra effort in performance. The results of our studies showed that both ABA front-line staff and Graduate Assistants are most susceptible to two persuasive strategies - Commitment and Reciprocity, followed by Authority and least susceptible to Consensus and Scarcity among Cialdini’s persuasive principles. Among the social influence persuasive strategies, employees from both studies were most susceptible to Trustworthiness. Whilst there was no statistically significant difference between the other social influence persuasive strategies (Reward, Competition, Social Comparison, Social Learning) among ABA employees, Graduate Assistants were more susceptible to Reward and Competition and least susceptible to Social Comparison and Social Learning. However, gender and continent of origin influenced the susceptibility of Graduate Assistants to Trustworthiness and Social Learning. North American Males are not influenced by Social Learning in contrast to African Males who influenced by it. Although North American females are least susceptible to Social Learning, they are still influenced by it. These results imply the investment in a persuasive gamified system that will facilitate the satisfaction of the Basic Psychological Needs of employees to increase their intrinsic motivation in effective documentation of analysis and evaluations. Persuasive and game elements that support Rewards, Competition, Trustworthiness, Commitment, Reciprocity and Authority could be used to achieve this. To make these results actionable, requirement guidelines have been recommended for both workplaces based on the insights gathered from the user studies. However, these requirements have not been evaluated. Therefore, future work will involve the design, development and evaluation of a persuasive gamified system based on the requirements specifications. Also, to draw definite conclusions on tailoring persuasive strategies to individuals and groups, future research should consider the impact of other workplace diversity factors that may impact susceptibility to these persuasive strategies

INTEGRATING PERSUASIVE MESSAGING STRATEGIES INTO HIGHER EDUCATION EARLY ALERT INTERVENTIONS TO IMPROVE STUDENT ACADEMIC BEHAVIORS

Higher Education is at a critical juncture as both public and private institutions seek to attract, retain, and graduate students. Institutions of higher education have traditionally developed communication and engagement strategies that become part of early warning/alert systems intended to increase student positive academic behaviors and improve student success. Persuasion can be a powerful tool in improving communication—especially when persuasive messages are deployed within the complex and ever-changing media landscape. Communication and persuasion scholars, for example, have applied persuasive messaging interventions in a variety of contexts but have yet to substantially apply these persuasive tactics in a higher education setting. The current study seeks to overcome this deficit by applying Cialdini’s (2001) persuasion principles of consensus and authority, along with Kaptein’s (2009) susceptibility to persuasion construct, to determine whether higher education early alert systems can improve positive student academic behaviors. As such, the current study uses a 2 (susceptibility to persuasion) X 2 (message consensus) X 2 (message authority) factorial design to test whether the integration of persuasion principles into intervention messages improves the efficacy of an early alert intervention. A total of 622 undergraduate students were recruited in fall of 2020 from a research one university in the southeastern United States and completed an only survey. Results revealed two significant main effects: one for susceptibility to persuasion and a second for message authority. Individuals high on susceptibility to persuasion reported greater intentions to engage in positive academic behaviors. The second main effect revealed that individuals who received the high authority alert message expressed greater intentions to engage in positive academic behaviors. No significant main effect was reported for consensus messages. Likewise, no significant interaction effects were revealed for any of the three variables operating in tandem. Implications are discussed as they relate to higher education administrators who are considering new messaging strategies and tactics for improving undergraduate academic early alert systems before acknowledging limitations associated with the current study. This dissertation concludes with an exploration of future directions that involve additional persuasion principles (beyond authority and consensus) to determine how they might potentially improve persuasion attempts across contexts both inside and outside of higher education

Evaluation of the Perceived Persuasiveness Questionnaire:User-Centered Card-Sort Study

Background: eHealth technologies aim to change users’ health-related behavior. Persuasive design and system features can make an eHealth technology more motivating, engaging, or supportive to its users. The Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model incorporates software features that have the possibility to increase the persuasiveness of technologies. However, the effects of specific PSD software features on the effectiveness of an intervention are still largely unknown. The Perceived Persuasiveness Questionnaire (PPQ) was developed to gain insight into the working mechanisms of persuasive technologies. Although the PPQ seems to be a suitable method for measuring subjective persuasiveness, it needs to be further evaluated to determine how suitable it is for measuring perceived persuasiveness among the public. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the face and construct validity of the PPQ, identify points of improvement, and provide suggestions for further development of the PPQ. Methods: A web-based closed-ended card-sort study was performed wherein participants grouped existing PPQ items under existing PPQ constructs. Participants were invited via a Massive Open Online Course on eHealth. A total of 398 people (average age 44.15 years, SD 15.17; 251/398, 63.1% women) completed the card sort. Face validity was evaluated by determining the item-level agreement of the original PPQ constructs. Construct validity was evaluated by determining the construct in which each item was placed most often, regardless of the original placement and how often 2 items were (regardless of the constructs) paired together and what interitem correlations were according to a cluster analysis. Results: Four PPQ constructs obtained relatively high face validity scores: perceived social support, use continuance, perceived credibility, and perceived effort. Item-level agreement on the other constructs was relatively low. Item-level agreement for almost all constructs, except perceived effort and perceived effectiveness, would increase if items would be grouped differently. Finally, a cluster analysis of the PPQ indicated that the strengths of the newly identified 9 clusters varied strongly. Unchanged strong clusters were only found for perceived credibility support, perceived social support, and use continuance. The placement of the other items was much more spread out over the other constructs, suggesting an overlap between them. Conclusions: The findings of this study provide a solid starting point toward a redesigned PPQ that is a true asset to the field of persuasiveness research. To achieve this, we advocate that the redesigned PPQ should adhere more closely to what persuasiveness is according to the PSD model and to the mental models of potential end users of technology. The revised PPQ should, for example, enquire if the user thinks anything is done to provide task support but not how this is done exactly

Recommender Systems for Healthy Behavior Change

Sedentary lifestyles and bad eating habits influence the onset of many serious health problems. Healthy behavior change is an arduous task, and requires a careful planning. In this thesis, we propose that behavior recommenders can help their users achieve healthy behavior change. Such a system should inspire its users with small, incremental and achievable goals. For this, it must resolve a trade-off between two opposing objectives: help the user achieve a steady improvement in target behavior, and avoid extreme goals that may injure or discourage the user. This is an unprecedented challenge in the recommender systems research. If the system understands the impacts of past interventions for behavior change, it can determine its usersâ behavioral responses to its own recommendations. This implies a specific data curation, in which we not only measure people's behavior but also deliberately introduce an intervention to monitor its effect on people's patterns. In turn, the system can use these existing users' information to derive the right procedure for effective recommendations. In this study we capitalize on this insight and develop InspiRE - our behavior recommender framework. Through InspiRE we propose the following contributions: 1) We design the data curation. 2) We develop the novel approaches for behavior profiling 3) We develop an evaluation process for this novel type of recommender system, and also compare it with traditional, similarity-based recommendation approach. We curate a dataset that contains information of daily step counts and social intervention for 83 people. InspiRE successfully uses the observations from this dataset, and proposes recommendations that are both effective and feasible. We also show that InspiRE can generalize to other dimensions of well being: we demonstrate this through a dataset that contains the snacking patterns of 73 people, who receive message-based interventions. We observe that InspiRE's recommendation strategy is in line with theories of behavior change

DESIGN FOR BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: A MODEL-DRIVEN APPROACH FOR TAILORING PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGIES

People generally want to engage in a healthy lifestyle, to live in harmony with the environment, to contribute to social causes, and to avoid behaviours that are harmful for themselves and others. However, people often find it difficult to motivate themselves to engage in these beneficial behaviours. Even adopting a healthy lifestyle, such as healthy eating, physical activity, or smoking cessation, is hard despite being aware of the benefits. The increasing adoption and integration of technologies into our daily lives present unique opportunities to assist individuals to adopt healthy behaviours using technology. As a result, research on how to use technology to motivate health behaviour change has attracted the attention of both researchers and health practitioners. Technology designed for the purpose of bringing about desirable behaviour and attitude changes is referred to as Persuasive Technology (PT). Over the past decade, several PTs have been developed to motivate healthy behaviour, including helping people with addictive behaviour such as substance abuse, assisting individuals to achieve personal wellness, helping people manage diseases, and engaging people in preventive behaviours. Most of these PTs take a one-size-fits-all design approach. However, people differ in their motivation and beliefs about health and what constitutes a healthy life. A technology that motivates one type of person to change her behaviour may actually deter behaviour change for another type of person. As a result, existing PTs that are based on the one-size-fits-all approach may not be effective for promoting healthy behaviour change for most people. Because of the motivational pull that games offer, many PTs deliver their intervention in the form of games. This type of game-based PTs are referred to as persuasive games. Considering the increasing interest in delivering PT as a game, this dissertation uses persuasive games as a case study to illustrate the danger of applying the one-size-fits-all approach, the value and importance of tailoring PT, and to propose an approach for tailoring PTs to increase their efficacy. To address the problem that most existing PTs employ the one-size-fits-all design approach, I developed the Model-driven Persuasive Technology (MPT) design approach for tailoring PTs to various user types. The MPT is based on studying and modelling user’s behaviour with respect to their motivations. I developed the MPT approach in two preliminary studies (N = 221, N = 554) that model the determinants of healthy eating for people from different cultures, of different ages, and of both genders. I then applied the MPT approach in two large-scale studies to develop models for tailoring persuasive games to various gamer types. In the first study (N = 642), I examine eating behaviours and associated determinants, using the Health Belief Model. Using data from the study, I modelled the determinants of healthy eating behaviour for various gamer types. In the second study (N = 1108), I examined the persuasiveness of PT design strategies and developed models for tailoring the strategies to various gamer types. Behavioural determinants and PT design strategies are the two fundamental building blocks that drive PT interventions. The models revealed that some strategies were more effective for particular gamer types, thus, providing guidelines for tailoring persuasive games to various gamer types. To show the feasibility of the MPT design approach, I applied the model to design and develop two versions of a Model-driven Persuasive Game (MPG) targeting two distinct gamer types. To demonstrate the importance of tailoring persuasive games using the MPG approach, I conducted a large-scale evaluation (N = 802) of the two versions of the game and compared the efficacy of the tailored, contra-tailored, and the one-size-fits-all persuasive games condition with respect to their ability to promote positive changes in attitude, self-efficacy, and intention. To also demonstrate that the tailored MPG games inspire better play experience than the one-size-fits-all and the contra-tailored persuasive games, I measure the gamers’ perceived enjoyment and competence under the different game conditions. The results of the evaluation showed that while PTs can be effective for promoting healthy behaviour in terms of attitude, self-efficacy, and intention, the effectiveness of persuasion depends on using the right choice of persuasive strategy for each gamer type. The results showed that one size does not fit all and answered my overarching research question of whether there is a value in tailoring PT to an individual or group. The answer is that persuasive health interventions are more effective if they are tailored to the user types under consideration and that not tailoring PTs could be detrimental to behaviour change