Gamifying education: what is known, what is believed and what remains uncertain: a critical review

By Christo Dichev, Darina Dicheva. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2017

1,229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gamification of education is a developing approach for increasing learners’ motivation and engagement by incorporating game design elements in educational environments. With the growing popularity of gamification and yet mixed success of its application in educational contexts, the current review is aiming to shed a more realistic light on the research in this field by focusing on empirical evidence rather than on potentialities, beliefs or preferences. Accordingly, it critically examines the advancement in gamifying education. The discussion is structured around the used gamification mechanisms, the gamified subjects, the type of gamified learning activities, and the study goals, with an emphasis on the reliability and validity of the reported outcomes. To improve our understanding and offer a more realistic picture of the progress of gamification in education, consistent with the presented evidence, we examine both the outcomes reported in the papers and how they have been obtained. While the gamification in education is still a growing phenomenon, the review reveals that (i) insufficient evidence exists to support the long-term benefits of gamification in educational contexts; (ii) the practice of gamifying learning has outpaced researchers’ understanding of its mechanisms and methods; (iii) the knowledge of how to gamify an activity in accordance with the specifics of the educational context is still limited. The review highlights the need for systematically designed studies and rigorously tested approaches confirming the educational benefits of gamification, if gamified learning is to become a recognized instructional approach.

Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9eccfc54e7b125f3c3e044e0fca40c3e80dccbac

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation

Citations in the corpus

Gamification of health professions education: a systematic review (2020, background): “In doing so, we added a new perspective to existing reviews on gamification in higher (Caponetto et al. 2014; De Sousa Borges et al. 2014; Dichev and Dicheva 2017; Dicheva et al. 2015; Faiella and Ricciardi 2015; Nah et al. 2014; Subhash and Cudney 2018) and health professions education (Gentry et…”
Gamification of education and learning: A review of empirical literature (2018, background): “Some literature reviews have been limited by the number of studies included: de Sousa Borges et al. (2014) limited their review to 26 studies; Dicheva et al. (2014) included only 36 studies, and Dichev and Dicheva (2017) have reviewed 63 studies.”
The Gamification of Learning: a Meta-analysis (2019, background): “Because studies in the context of gamification have often lacked methodological rigor (Dicheva and Dichev 2015, 2017), we included methodological factors to account for possible differences in methodological study design and rigor across primary studies.”
Gamification of e-learning in higher education: a systematic literature review (2023, background): “…back-ward snowballing search to identify further relevant studies by scanning and searching the references of papers marked as potentially relevant (Dichev & Dicheva, 2017; Mora et al., 2017; Gari & Radermacher, 2018; Khalil et al., 2018; Ozdamli, 2018; Subhash & Cudney, 2018; da Silva et al.,…”
The impact of gamification on students’ learning, engagement and behavior based on their personality traits (2020, background): “Gamification of education is a strategy for increasing engagement by incorporating game elements into an educational environment (Dichev and Dicheva 2017).”
Investigating the effects of gamification-enhanced flipped learning on undergraduate students’ behavioral and cognitive engagement (2018, methodology): “A recent review by Dichev and Dicheva (2017) analyzed 51 empirical studies of gami ﬁ cation in education.”