Gamification as a tool for engaging student learning: A field experiment with a gamified app (What the papers say)
"One of the things that’s really powerful about video games is the level of connection between how hard you work and the feedback you receive for your behavior." - Przybylski
A journal article on the experimentation of Gamification as a tool for engaging student learning. The experiment was conducted in Netherland and was used to test students' knowledge about the school by engaging them in interesting ways or better put it in a gamified way.
The authors explored two forms of gamifies approach
1. The use of a quiz application called Knowingo which was meant to help University students learn essential information about their university and explored the usage of a personalized feedback versus a generalized feedback.
2. The effects of distributed learning by putting a daily limit on the number of sessions a student can play in a day compared to binge learning
The exploration of gamification in academics can be dated back to 1980 when Thomas W. Malone published "What Makes things fun to learn: A study of Intrinsically Motivating Computer Games" he talked about the usage of gaming in other areas, which was referenced in this journal article. The outcome of the authors experiment showed that a generalized feedback was more effective than a personalized feedback which contrasted with the authors expectations and mine when i started reading the article as they used data analytic formulas to get close to accurate results and understanding of the experiment. They also found distributed learning to be more effective than binge learning as the students performed better when they took breaks.
However, the experiment was not without its limitations as the authors have rightly admitted, the number of students involved in this experiment were not large enough to be able to completely conclude that these outcomes can be relied on. The timing could have played part in the outcome, the faculty of choice (social science) could have had its effect on the outcome, for instance, it is possible the outcome could have been different if the students were from a different faculty like engineering and also the lack of compensation or rewards attached to the quiz application could have affected the outcome.
In conclusion, the results and experimentation of gamification can be rather diverse as it can be affected by a variety of factors from cultural to social. For instance, a personalized gamified approach has proven to be more effective when it comes to ride hailing applications such as Uber as riders and passengers get personalized targets and compensations according to how often they use the application.
References
Kasper Welbers, Elly A Koniin, Christian Burgers, Anna Bij de Vaate, Allison Eden, Eden, Britta C. Brugman (2019). Gamification as a tool for engaging student learning: A field experiment with a gamified app. Retrieved from https://journals-sagepub com.salford.idm.oclc.org/doi/epub/10.1177/2042753018818342
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