Educational Escape Rooms: A Narrative Review of Design Frameworks in Higher Education

The increasing trend of educational escape rooms, has gained great popularity among today’s digitally native students resulting in a significant increase in research into their design and application. Given the significance of designing educational escape rooms based on validated frameworks to guide the design and development of novel learning environments for instructional designers and educators, this study was conducted to review and compare existing design frameworks for educational escape rooms and their characteristics. Following the PRISMA checklist and inclusion criteria, using related keywords, we reviewed the literature indexed in Google Scholar, Scopus, PubMed, and ERIC from January 2000 to December 2024. Both reviewers carried out study selection and data extraction, and the extracted data was synthesized by a narrative approach. Out of 214 articles, finally 34 articles were included in the review. Based on the findings, various frameworks have been introduced for designing and developing escape rooms, but most of them rarely validate the frameworks' usability and effectiveness. Furthermore, no unified theoretical foundation and conceptual framework for designing educational escape rooms has been established so far, leading to heterogeneity in study designs. This calls for the need to design a unified comprehensive framework to help instructional designers and educators in creating innovative learning environments suited for 21st-century education.