Promoting Global Empathy and Engagement through Real-Time Problem-Based Simulations

We introduce a real-time problem-based simulation in which students are tasked with drafting policy to address the challenge of internally displaced persons in post-earthquake Haiti from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. Students who participated in the simulation completed a quantitative survey as a pre-/post-test on global empathy, political awareness, and civic engagement and provided qualitative data through post-simulation focus groups. The simulation was run in four courses across three campuses in a variety of instructional settings from 2013 to 2015. An analysis of the data reveals that scores on several survey items measuring global empathy and political/civic engagement increased significantly after the simulation, while qualitative student comments corroborated the results. This format of a real-time problem-based policy-making simulation is readily adaptable to other ongoing and future global crises using the framework provided in this paper.