{"title":"Gamified interactive e-books for bullying prevention: enhancing knowledge and motivation in Chinese primary schools.","authors":"Jiawei Shao, Siti Nazleen Abdul Rabu, Chuang Chen","doi":"10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1509549","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Bullying is increasingly prevalent in Chinese schools, contributing to a rise in associated criminal cases. A key factor in this trend is the lack of comprehensive understanding of bullying. Studies indicate a clear correlation between the level of understanding of bullying and its frequency. The adverse effects of bullying are expected to persist into adulthood, particularly during the crucial phase of behavioral and cognitive development in elementary school, when children are most receptive to changes in behavior and attitudes. Traditional lecture-based methods used to teach bullying awareness to Chinese primary school students often result in boredom and disengagement, reducing their ability to comprehend and address bullying effectively. This study developed a gamified interactive e-book (GIEB) aimed at enhancing the motivation and anti-bullying knowledge of Chinese primary school students. A quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest assessments was employed to evaluate the approach's effectiveness. The study involved 60 third-grade students from a public primary school in Hefei, Anhui Province, China, who were randomly assigned to either an experimental group using the gamified interactive e-books (GIEB group) or a control group receiving traditional lectures (TL group). Findings indicated that the GIEB group showed significant improvements in motivation and understanding of bullying compared to the TL group. This research highlights the potential of gamified interactive e-books as effective educational tools for bullying prevention by making learning more engaging and effective. The practical implications of this study suggest that integrating gamified interactive e-books into the curriculum could significantly enhance students' motivation to learn about bullying and their anti-bullying knowledge, ultimately contributing to more effective bullying prevention in schools.</p>","PeriodicalId":12525,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Psychology","volume":"16 ","pages":"1509549"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11903473/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Frontiers in Psychology","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1509549","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Bullying is increasingly prevalent in Chinese schools, contributing to a rise in associated criminal cases. A key factor in this trend is the lack of comprehensive understanding of bullying. Studies indicate a clear correlation between the level of understanding of bullying and its frequency. The adverse effects of bullying are expected to persist into adulthood, particularly during the crucial phase of behavioral and cognitive development in elementary school, when children are most receptive to changes in behavior and attitudes. Traditional lecture-based methods used to teach bullying awareness to Chinese primary school students often result in boredom and disengagement, reducing their ability to comprehend and address bullying effectively. This study developed a gamified interactive e-book (GIEB) aimed at enhancing the motivation and anti-bullying knowledge of Chinese primary school students. A quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest assessments was employed to evaluate the approach's effectiveness. The study involved 60 third-grade students from a public primary school in Hefei, Anhui Province, China, who were randomly assigned to either an experimental group using the gamified interactive e-books (GIEB group) or a control group receiving traditional lectures (TL group). Findings indicated that the GIEB group showed significant improvements in motivation and understanding of bullying compared to the TL group. This research highlights the potential of gamified interactive e-books as effective educational tools for bullying prevention by making learning more engaging and effective. The practical implications of this study suggest that integrating gamified interactive e-books into the curriculum could significantly enhance students' motivation to learn about bullying and their anti-bullying knowledge, ultimately contributing to more effective bullying prevention in schools.
期刊介绍:
Frontiers in Psychology is the largest journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across the psychological sciences, from clinical research to cognitive science, from perception to consciousness, from imaging studies to human factors, and from animal cognition to social psychology. Field Chief Editor Axel Cleeremans at the Free University of Brussels is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and communicating scientific knowledge and impactful discoveries to researchers, academics, clinicians and the public worldwide. The journal publishes the best research across the entire field of psychology. Today, psychological science is becoming increasingly important at all levels of society, from the treatment of clinical disorders to our basic understanding of how the mind works. It is highly interdisciplinary, borrowing questions from philosophy, methods from neuroscience and insights from clinical practice - all in the goal of furthering our grasp of human nature and society, as well as our ability to develop new intervention methods.