دانلود رایگان مقاله اثربخشی رویکرد بازی مانند و مقایسه بازی آموزشی، گیمیفیکیشن و شبکه اجتماعی

Abstract

Game-like approaches are becoming increasingly popular in education, with educational games and gamification drawing increasing levels of attention. While games specifically designed for educational purposes have been used for decades, gamification is particularly new and contrasting evidence was presented about its effectiveness. The potential of social networks has also been harnessed by educators and institutions either using popular social networking sites or specific educational instances. This paper studies how well-established approaches (educational game and social networking) compare with more novel ones (gamification and social gamification) in terms of learning performance in an undergraduate course. Four experimental conditions were compared in an experiment (N = 379). Results suggest that all experimental conditions significantly impact on learning performance, but social gamification returned better results in terms of immediacy and for all types of assessments.

5. Conclusions and future research

This work studied the effect that an educational game, gamification, social networking and social gamification have on learning performance in an undergraduate course. Our aim was to study the four experimental conditions on the same educational setting to facilitate comparative analysis. Results suggest that all experimental conditions significantly impact on learning performance. Moderate differences were also found when experimental conditions were compared suggesting that social networking and social gamification produced better results even at early stages of the course (week 3). The effects on the different kinds of evaluation items were also studied and we found that in a final examination designed to assess conceptual knowledge, the new approaches did not yield any benefit when compared with a control group. Students that used the educational game, the gamification plugin and social network performed poorly when compared with the social gami- fication and control (blended-learning) groups. Social gamification returned better results in terms of immediacy across different evaluation items. This study then stresses the difference between practical skills, where new media resulted appropriate, and conceptual knowledge, where blended-learning resulted better, highlighting the necessity of complementarity for balanced teaching and learning, and providing insights about how and for what use the different tools. Results are circumscribed to a very specific population of young adult undergraduate students in an undergraduate course on ICT qualification. With these caveats about generalization in mind, we can also suggest that already available educational games have the potential to be easily integrated in educational settings producing boosts in terms of learning performance of practical skills. Reward-based competitive gamification or social networking can also be integrated with comparable results, although social networking is effective sooner. Finally social gamification produces better results across all evaluation items and also at earlier stages.