Intrinsic Motivation for Social Media Literacy, a Look into the Narrative Scripts

Social media embodies the idyllic representation of the information society providing users opportunities to connect and communicate. Likewise, it can represent humanity’s worst nightmare with a plethora of negative phenomena. Different forms of media literacy interventions have been designed as preventative tools to counteract the negative phenomena of social media. One such approach, the narrative scripts, sees the integration of a social media intervention within a controlled social media platform. With an importance to design engaging educational tools to get learners attention without limiting the educational deliverables, the narrative scripts approach sees the implementation of gamifying elements to help deliver the learning material and motivate learners to participate. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed motivational properties of the narrative scripts, a descriptive exploratory study was designed. In total 124 adolescents participated in a social media literacy workshop powered by the narrative scripts. During the workshop students completed missions assigned by a virtual learning companion and participated in collaborative learning activities. To measure the motivation levels of the students, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory was applied. Results demonstrate that adolescents found the narrative scripts an interesting and enjoyable activity. Qualitative analysis supported the findings with adolescents describing the activities as dynamic and entertaining. The results from this study provide insights towards the motivational aspects of the narrative scripts as a social media intervention tool.