Gamification has become a popular educational approach, having demonstrated strong potential as a learning tool. However, it is not always clear exactly which gamified elements are helpful, and in some cases it can foster counterproductive competition and enhance extrinsic motivation rather than the more effective intrinsic motivation.
Education experts Sebastian Deterding and Naomi Clark have studied the benefits and limitations of gamification in education and acknowledge that the approach has pros and cons.
Here's a closer look at the research surrounding gamification.
Golden stars of gamification
Overall, gamification should deserve a badge of achievement. A 2020 review of empirical studies analyzing gamification The intervention was found to have small but significant positive effects on cognitive, motivational, and behavioral outcomes.
“There seemed to be particular evidence for interventions that combine collaborative and competitive elements,” says Deterding, chair of Design Engineering at Imperial College London.
Rather than having students compete individually against each other or work together, the best gamification results seemed to occur when groups of students were divided into teams and competed against each other, creating a “collaborative and competitive environment,” Deterding says.
Naomi Clark, director of New York University's Game Center at the Tisch School of the Arts, says gamification works by giving students additional motivation and feedback that helps them measure their progress.
That extra motivation can be particularly helpful when a student is learning a new skill and hasn't yet seen the fruits of their efforts. “What you do is break things down into small steps and say, ‘We're going to give you a little bit of positive reinforcement for finishing a task,'” Clark says.
At the same time, by tracking scores as if they were a game, Clark says, gamification processes help students reflect on what they've accomplished and see how they've grown.
When gamification gets out of hand
Currently, our knowledge of why gamification works is limited.
“Once we get down to the level of these individual design elements, we actually know very little because the research is so poor,” says Deterding. “Most gamification interventions just combine a bunch of features into the same intervention and then look at the overall outcome. So we can’t really say anything about the individual elements.”
But these small design elements can have a big impact. A study that Deterding conducted with colleagues They found that the way college students interpreted badges while using Khan Academy and Code Academy influenced their learning.
“If you understood them as a goal-setting element — for the system to tell you what to try and what to work on next — that was generally helpful,” he says.
But if you viewed badges as a reward, you were often tempted to keep earning rewards by spending more time on skills you had already mastered. “So it was actually very detrimental to learning,” Deterding says.
This highlights one of the problems with gamification.
“Gamification has been shown to rely on what psychologists call ‘extrinsic motivation’ – you get a reward that isn’t necessarily an inherent or built-in part of what you’re doing,” Clark says.
Intrinsic motivation to learn to cook, for example, would be to get better at cooking because of the joy that skill brings, Clark says. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation could be a random reward for peeling potatoes. “The problem with extrinsic motivation is that it can actually cause intrinsic motivation to deteriorate,” Clark says.
Navigating towards positive results with gamification
Maximizing the benefits and minimizing the potential downsides of gamification is often a matter of good, common-sense teaching practices. For example, one can look for game elements that enhance intrinsic motivation by reminding students of the inherent values of the skill they are learning. Teachers can do this by incorporating storytelling into the gamified elements of the lesson and emphasizing their real-world implications.
Clark says a related term called “gamification” focuses on this aspect. “It's not just rote memorization; you learn to read a word, but then you read a story and you're like, 'Oh, this is really cool, I can experience the story now that I can read it on my own. It's not just about getting stars and badges and trumpet sounds to reward me.'”
Deterding says educators can maximize the benefits of gamification through trial and error. “The way I approach my own classes, the way I’m sure a lot of educators approach their classes, is to try and see what happens,” he says. “Maybe you even ask your students afterward, ‘How was it? What did you think? Did you not like it? Why, etc.?’ And then you repeat that practice. So don’t view gamification as a one-time, foolproof exercise, which I think applies to most educational interventions.”
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