Stealth Assessment of Children's Connection to Nature in a Serious Game

This study develops and validates a stealth assessment tool for measuring children's connection to nature, using a web-based serious game called Tito as an alternative to traditional self-report questionnaires. The authors argue that children aged 10 to 11 struggle with abstract constructs and social desirability bias when completing conventional instruments, and that behavioral evidence captured unobtrusively during gameplay may offer a more ecologically valid measure. The game was built on Evidence Centered Design and operationalizes the four dimensions of the Connection to Nature Index (CNI): enjoyment, empathy, oneness, and responsibility.

The study sampled 83 fourth-grade students from a single elementary school in Tehran, Iran, all of whom completed the Persian CNI questionnaire and then played the game for eight minutes while telemetry logged their in-game choices, such as avoiding crushing insects, planting seeds, and collecting waste. The primary finding is a statistically significant positive correlation between gameplay-derived stealth scores and CNI total scores (r = 0.33, p = 0.002), with significant but smaller correlations for each subdimension, ranging from r = 0.23 to 0.28. Qualitative observations and brief student interviews are reported as consistent with these behavioral indicators. The authors conclude that the approach shows promise as a valid alternative to self-report, while acknowledging that the sample was small, drawn by convenience from one school, and limited to convergent validity with a single session.