From Narrative Decisions to Assessment Evidence: A Narrative-Based Assessment Framework for Serious Games: A Pilot Feasibility Study

Abstract

Assessing socially situated decision-making is challenging when assessment approaches separate observable decisions from the contexts in which they occur. This study proposes and operationalizes a seven-stage Narrative-Based Assessment (NBA) framework for eliciting and interpreting assessment-relevant observations through branching interactive narratives. The framework was implemented in a multimodal Interactive Graphic Novel using adolescent cyberbullying bystander situations as an illustrative domain and examined through a pilot feasibility study with 39 lower-secondary students. The implementation generated 202 assessment-relevant observations. Participant decisions were captured together with contextual metadata, processed through predefined decision-to-evidence mappings, and descriptively aggregated while preserving their narrative conditions. The pilot established the operational feasibility and traceability of the proposed architecture and demonstrated the operational use of the decision-in-context as the basic unit of assessment-relevant observation. It also identified a central measurement challenge: observations assigned to the same evidence category cannot be assumed to be equivalent when generated under different narrative conditions or decision pathways. NBA therefore treats narrative context not merely as an engagement layer but as part of the evidence-elicitation architecture. The findings do not establish the validity or reliability of NBA assessment inferences. Further research should examine content validity, reliability across comparable narrative situations, cross-branch evidence equivalence, and relationships with independently validated measures.