Escaping a second time round: A replication and extension study on the motivational climate of and knowledge gain in a general pharmacology course

As students often experience difficulties with grasping pharmacological concepts, enhancing motivation is essential to allow for academic success in this field. This replication and extension study investigates the students' perceptions of the motivational climate and their knowledge gain of both a general pharmacology course and an escape room intervention in a mixed-method design. Students of two consecutive cohorts (from 2022 to 2024) completed the MUSIC® motivation questionnaire at different time points during the course; week 2, week 5, and following the escape room. This questionnaire was accompanied by two open-ended questions, for which content analysis was used to enrich the quantitative data, and ten multiple choice questions to gauge knowledge gain. Students' perceptions of the motivational climate of the course differed between cohorts and declined in time whilst the students' perceptions of the motivational climate increased following the escape room. Only the course, but not the escape room, induced a small but significant increase in knowledge gain in cohort 2022-2023. Qualitative data revealed that the decline in motivation during the course could be explained, amongst others, by the high workload. Unlike the course, the escape room intervention encouraged a significant increase in the students' perception of motivational climate of multiple subscales of the MUSIC® inventory in both cohorts. This finding was verified by qualitative data with students describing the escape room as fun and engaging. Although the escape room was not considered an effective formative assessment tool; this study has demonstrated that the pharmacokinetics escape room increases students' motivation.