The use of gamification in education: a bibliometric and text mining analysis

Abstract

The use of games in education represents a promising tool to motivate and engage students in their learning process. Most of previous research on the topic has focused to develop theoretical frameworks or to conduct experiments as a means to analyse learning outcomes such as knowledge retention, problem-solving skills gains or attitudes toward game-based learning. Nevertheless, little research has focused on providing a comprehensive literature review, which will help researchers to better understand how this stream of research has evolved over the last years. In this study, we use a bibliometric, social network and text mining analysis in order to provide useful up-to-date information to picture the state of the art about current research and evolution of the topic. Analysis on a sample of 139 articles published in top journals over the last 5 years (2010-2014) allowed identifying relevant authors and institutions, key constructs and themes involved, and trends of knowledge development. Main findings suggest an increasing academic interest on the topic over the last 5 years and a wide variety of constructs that were clustered in four main themes that we named: (i) effectiveness, (ii) acceptance, (iii) engagement and (iv) social interactions. Future research lines are also addressed.

Gamification in Management Education: A Systematic Literature Review

“…This article presents a number of results about game-based learning in order to highlight more adequate and effective trends and practices. As this is a recently developed subject, there is still the possibility to expand already available knowledge through literature reviews (Hamari et al, OPEN ACCESS 2014;Martí-Parreño, Méndez-Ibáñez, & Alonso-Arroyo, 2016;Nah, Zeng, Telaprolu, Ayyappa, & Eschenbrenner, 2014;Surendeleg, Murwa, Yun, & Kim, 2014). The main goal of this article is to develop a conceptual research model of applying games to management education based on a systematic literature review that focuses on the most relevant literature regarding the application of gamification to educational contexts in order to grasp gamification's main themes and constructs.…”

An immersive virtual reality task with physical movement for the assessment of spatial memory

“…On another of our previous works, we demonstrated that the improvement in knowledge is also statistically significant when the students play in pairs and also in large groups (up to 12 children) (Martín-SanJosé et al 2015). These results are in line with previous works that have argued for the immense potential of educational computer games in helping students to improve their learning performance (e.g., Hwang and Wu 2012;Martí-Parreño, Méndez-Ibáñez, and Alonso-Arroyo 2016).…”

Gamified approach to teaching introductory astronomy online

“…Of these 34, only two studies looked at gamification in online classes. A later study, with less stringent selection criteria, identified 139 articles on gamification in educational settings between 2010 and 2014, but went into little detail about the overall content of those articles or what levels of education they addressed [21].…”