Digital Commons Network^™

A Desire Fulfillment Theory Of Digital Game Enjoyment, Owen M. Schaffer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Empirical research on what makes digital games enjoyable is critical for practitioners who want to design for enjoyment, including for Game Design, Gamification, and Serious Games. But existing theories of what leads to digital game enjoyment have been incomplete or lacking in empirical support showing their impact on enjoyment.

Desire Fulfillment Theory is proposed as a new theory of what leads to digital game enjoyment and tested through research with people who have recently played a digital game. This theory builds on three established theories: Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, Theory of Basic Human Desires, and Flow Theory. These three theories are …

Information Extraction From Primary Care Visits To Support Patient-Provider Interactions, Daniel Baruch Gutstein

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The extent of electronic health record systems usage in clinical settings has affected the dynamic between clinicians and patients and has thus been connected to physician morale and the quality of care patients receive. Recent research has also uncovered a correlation between physician burnout and negative physician attitudes electronic health record systems. In order to begin exploring the nature of the relationship between electronic health record usage, physician burnout, and patient care, it is necessary to first analyze patient-provider interactions within the context of verbal features such as turn-taking and non-verbal features such as eye-contact. While previous works have sought …

Automatic Inference Of Causal Reasoning Chains From Student Essays, Simon Mark Hughes

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

While there has been an increasing focus on higher-level thinking skills arising from the Common Core Standards, many high-school and middle-school students struggle to combine and integrate information from multiple sources when writing essays. Writing is an important learning skill, and there is increasing evidence that writing about a topic develops a deeper understanding in the student. However, grading essays is time consuming for teachers, resulting in an increasing focus on shallower forms of assessment that are easier to automate, such as multiple-choice tests. Existing essay grading software has attempted to ease this burden but relies on shallow lexico-syntactic features …