Effect of Gamification on students’ motivation and learning achievement in Second Language Acquisition within higher education: a literature review 2011-2019

Abstract

<h4>This paper focuses on a fairly new motivational technique, the so-called Gamification, which consists of introducing game mechanics in non-game environments to promote motivation and engagement. By the turn of the 21rst century, Gamification took off in the business field and soon after became an attractive concept for researchers and professionals in education as it appears to be an increasingly popular method to motivate learners. Nevertheless, it is still a nascent field in terms of empirical evidence available to firmly support its educational benefits. This paper intends to shed some more light on this topic through a comprehensive review of literature published in the most prominent journals. The present study is framed within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in higher education and Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and focuses on the effects of gamified learning environments on student’s motivation and learning. A Meta-analysis method was used to explore relevant empirical research published between 2011 and 2019. After reviewing a corpus of 68 papers drawn from the leading databases Scopus and Web Of Science, and from which only 15 could be included in the study, we can point out two main findings: (i) there is still very limited literature in the field of SLA and, (ii) results seem to be predominantly positive in terms of motivation and engagement but only a few studies confirm clear interconnections with learning outcomes. The results suggest a lack of solid correlations between Gamification, motivation and cognitive processes. </h4>

Effects of Inductive Learning and Gamification on News Veracity Discernment

“…Prior research has supported the effectiveness of using gamification in learning environments, especially for promoting motivation and engagement (Boudadi & Gutiérrez-Colón, 2020;Dong et al, 2012;Pesare et al, 2016). However, the present study did not demonstrate any benefits of using game design elements in non-game contexts.…”

Engaging Students with Interactive Education: The Motivational Qualities of Student Response Systems

“…Repeated quizzes with the use of gamification may therefore result in a lasting interest (Topîrceanu, 2017). The gamification literature, more broadly, would benefit from such an approach, since most of the previous experiments last just one or very few sessions (Boudadi & Gutiérrez-Colón, 2020;Sun and Hsieh, 2018).…”

Trends and gaps in empirical research on gamification in science education: A systematic review of the literature

“…One of the first reviews was conducted by Subhash and Cudney (2018) and supported several benefits of gamification such as improved students' performance, motivation, and learning perception. Another review study was conducted in the English language field by Boudadi and Gutierrez-Colon (2020) and found that gamification enhanced students' motivation and their learning engagement. Another study in the social environment field conducted by Brito and Mena (2020) indicated that gamification enhanced students' engagement and motivation levels.…”

“…Studies dedicated to gamification in general and in particular in science are still lacking. Furthermore, of those conducted, some indicated mixed findings as to the intervention's effectiveness (Boudadi & Gutierrez-Colon, 2020;Kalogiannakis et al, 2021). Recent studies on gamification to individual discipline are also still insufficient and further research is needed.…”