Tailored gamification in education: A literature review and future agenda

Abstract

Gamification has been widely used to design better educational systems aiming to increase students’ concentration, motivation, engagement, flow experience, and others positive experiences. With advances in research on gamification in education, over the past few years, many studies have highlighted the need to tailor the gamification design properties to match individual students’ needs, characteristics and preferences. Thus, different studies have been conducted to personalize the gamification in education. However, the results are still contradictory and need to be better understood to advance this field. To provide a complete understanding of this research domain, we conducted a systematic literature review to summarize the results and discussions on studies that cover the field of tailored gamified education. Following a systematic process, we analysed 2108 studies and identified 19 studies to answer our research questions. The results indicate that most of the studies only consider students’ gamer types to tailor the systems, and most of the experiments do not provide sufficient statistical evidence, especially regarding learning performance using tailored gamified systems. Based on the results, we also provided an agenda with different challenges, opportunities, and research directions to improve the literature on tailored gamification in education. Our study contributes to the field of gamification design in education.

Application of artificial intelligence in adaptation of gamification in education: A literature review

“…Artificial Intelligence approaches are grouped into two categories: AI algorithm and AI model/framework [47], as shown in Figure 7. Algorithms including supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, personalized, and built‐in algorithms are categorized under AI algorithm and the frameworks including adaptive, proposed, and reinforcement frameworks and models including existing and proposed model are categorized under AI framework/model.…”

“…However, the success of e‐learning is negatively correlated with learning motivation, training material, in‐person interactions, and ease of use. To increase concentration, motivation, engagement, flow, and other positive experiences, gamification has been widely used in the educational system [47]. Gamification is adding game‐like activities in nongame settings [56] with various gamification elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, avatars, and so on.…”

Continuous learning at work: the power of gamification

“…Research on gamification wasn't directly affected by the global pandemic but left a profound impact on the education world: classrooms were forcibly held online, and teachers and professors had to step up to the challenge with new ways to conduct a classroom. For this reason, gamification tools have been tried along with different strategies, such as microlearning and flipped classrooms (Ekici, 2021; Oliveira et al., 2023). In contrast, companies couldn't introduce game elements in the workplace for learning, as the main application until 2020 was mostly on training sessions or brief events (Hamari et al., 2014; Koivisto and Hamari, 2019; Bakhanova et al.…”

The Effect of Gamification on Students’ Learning

“…In recent years, various studies that applied gamification technique in the education area had been conducted. Previous study was also carried out on the transformation of education system to achieve motivational benefits the way games function to human being as well as relating it to investigating the gamification effect on students' learning experience (Seixas et al, 2016;Oliveira et al, 2022). Nonetheless, despite the results of previous studies showing increase in student engagement and motivation after using gamification technique in education (Koivisto and Hamari, 2019;Bai et al, 2020;Sailer and Homner, 2020), there are also studies that revealed the opposite effect of gamification such as discouragement and learning outcome impairment in certain set of students as found in the study of (Hanus and Fox, 2015;Toda et al, 2017;Kwon and Özpolat, 2021).…”