Positive Effects Of Gamification In Education

Students’ motivation and engagement are huge issues in the educational system because students often perceive education as boring (Lee & Hammer, 2011). In contrast, games can motivate people engage with them, usually without any kind of rewards, only for the sake of fun (Dicheva, Dichev, Agre, & Angelova, 2015).

This work will examine the use of gamification, which may be defined as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011, p. 10) in the context of education. If gamification is that closely related to games, it should create a fun environment, motivate students to increase their engagement with the topic and lead to overall better academic performances. This results in the hypothesis of this work:

Gamification used in educational environments improves educational outcomes.

Current research suggests that students have a positive attitude towards gamification in education (Cheong, Flilippou, & Cheong, 2014). Two literature reviews respectively mapping studies also indicate that most of the investigated papers see positive effects in gamification in an educational context (Dicheva et al., 2015; Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014). However, there are also studies that noted a negative effect on students motivation or written exams

(2014) conducted this literature review which deals with the state of research back in 2014 around the question whether gamification works or not. In total, 24 peer-reviewed empirical studies were examined, with the majority of those studies in the context and domain of learning and education. First, the review looks at motivational affordances which have been implemented in the reviewed studies: mostly points, leaderboards and badges. The reported results of most investigated studies suggest positive effects through gamification. However, some of the studies showed that these positive effects are only caused due to a novelty effect and are therefore not long-term