The Effectiveness of Gamification on Student Engagement, Learning Outcomes, and Learning Experiences

Abstract

Gamification has been widely used in the higher education to enhance users' learning experiences through the integration of game-like elements into the course materials. This study explores whether and how different levels of gamification in the instructional methods will influence student engagement with the course, overall learning experiences with the course, and learning outcomes with the course materials. The findings suggest that, among four indices to measure the success of gamification, three out of four show the positive gamification effects with a highly gamified class leads to higher level of student engagement than no or lowly gamified classes. The same positive gamification effects can be found in students' overall learning experience. Highly gamified classes result in better student learning outcomes as measured by their grades at different data collection points. Limitations of this study include small class sizes and no statistically significant results and only two gamified elements used. Implications and discussions were presented.