Learning to Escape or Escaping to Have Fun: Do Educational Escape Rooms Positively Impact Students' Performance in Business Higher Education?

Molina, Ramírez-Vásquez, and Cortez Márquez examine whether a digital educational escape room (DEER) improves business students' performance in a blended undergraduate course. The study is motivated by the growing use of escape rooms in education, alongside mixed evidence on whether they produce real learning gains, and by the scarcity of research on digital versions in business education. The authors designed a 50-minute remote escape room covering two core course topics, which teams of students solved via a digital platform one week before a midterm examination.

The study compared midterm grades from a treatment section of roughly 160 students (spring 2022) with those of a control section (fall 2021), drawn from 15 campuses across different cities. The data were not normally distributed according to the Shapiro-Wilk test, so the authors used a Wilcoxon test, which found no statistically significant difference in performance between the two groups (p = 0.1748). Mean scores were 79 for the control section and 81 for the treatment section, though this gap was not significant. A post-activity survey, using five-point scales, showed students rated the experience favorably: general opinion averaged 4.13, perceived fun 4.16, and perceived knowledge improvement 4.13, with 83 percent of students wanting similar activities in other courses.

The authors acknowledge several limitations, including changes to the midterm format between terms, uneven technical support across teams, operating system incompatibilities, and inconsistent completion of the preparatory activity. They conclude that escape rooms reliably deliver enjoyment and engagement but that their effect on academic achievement remains uncertain, and they recommend careful alignment with learning objectives, tutorials before implementation, and assured technical support.