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How gamification in education works?

Human behaviour are driven by extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1980)

Extrinsic Motivation:

• Reward-driven behaviour

• People behave in a certain way because of other separable consequent. eg. earning the rewards, avoiding punishments.

• When the reward or punishment removed, people will probably stop doing the target behaviour

Intrinsic Motivation

• People behave in a certain way because of inherent satisfaction.

• "Intrinsically motivated behaviors are those behaviors that are motivated by the underlying need for competence and self-determination."

*Self-Determination Theory (SDT)

• Autonomy-Allow people to make their decision by themselves

• Competence-Ability to be challenge appropriately

• Relatedness-Connection with others (i.e. social support)

A meaningful gamification should fulfilled the three factors in SDT, example: (Tan & Hew, 2016)

• Autonomy

-Points of the tasks are different depends on the difficulties, if students complete a more challenging task, they could earn more points

-Using points to motivated students to complete more challenging tasks

• Competency

-Using bonus points to motivate students to put more effort on their group tasks

• Relatedness

-Using badges to motivate students to give feedbacks to others

-Using leaderboard to encourage the competition among the class

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1980). The empirical exploration of intrinsic motivational processes. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 13, pp. 39-80). Academic Press.

Shpakova, A., Dörfler, V., & MacBryde, J. (2016). Gamification and innovation: a mutually beneficial union. In British Academy of Management Annual Conference: Thriving in Turbulent Times.

Tan, M., & Hew, K. F. (2016). Incorporating meaningful gamification in a blended learning research methods class: Examining student learning, engagement, and affective outcomes. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 32(5).