Mood States and Student Learning in Project Management
Validating and Extending Prior Research with New Data
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7160/eriesj.2026.190206Keywords:
education, project management, Profile of Mood States, Scrum, serious management gamesAbstract
Practical experience is a key component of teaching and learning in project management. In 2023–2025, we organized two practical project management seminars as part of a bachelor’s introductory project management course. In these seminars, we used serious management games to practise waterfall and agile approaches and to improve students’ teamwork, communication, and soft skills. We applied the Profile of Mood States method to evaluate changes in total mood and individual mood factors during the seminars. We collected and analysed data from 2024–2025 (n24 = 139, n25 = 98) and compared these results with prior findings from 2023 (n23 = 49). We found that students’ total mood improved significantly during both waterfall and agile seminars in all eligible years. Fatigue, depression, and confusion decreased significantly for both seminar types in all years, and tension decreased in most seminars. We will use these results to further improve the practical seminars and to introduce the solution to other areas.
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