Expanding Research on GDEs’ Effects in Gamified Education

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2. Background and Related Work and 2.1. Gamification

2.2. Game Design Elements and 2.3. Gamification Effects

2.4. Related Work on Gamification Negative Effects

3. Systematic Mapping and 3.1. The Research Questions

3.2. Search Strategy and 3.3. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

3.4. Applying the Search Strategy

3.5. Data Extraction

4. Systematic Mapping Results

5. Focus Group: Developer Perception on the Negative Effects of Game Design Elements

5.1. Context and Participant Characterization

5.2. Focus Group Design

5.3. The Developers’ Perception on The Negative Effects

5.4. On the Perceived Usefulness, Ease of use and Intent of Adoption of Mapped Negative Effects

5.5. Participant Feedback

6. Limitations

7. Concluding Remarks

7.1. Future Research Directions

Acknowledgements and References

7.1. Future Research Directions

Given the trends found by our research, more research focusing on the less explored GDEs and their negative effects is recommended. Beyond that, while this research expands the perception of relations between GDEs and negative effects, it is focused on academic research. Grey literature, although not following the same scientific rigor, could help to uncover terrains that researchers could further investigate.

It would also be interesting to systematically review the mapped papers in-depth, gathering further information about the population of each study, the categories of educational software used (courseware, classroom aids and learning management systems, etc), context factors related to the empirical studies, and details on their outcomes. This could help to better understand the conditions in which the GDEs may or may not generate those negative effects.

Regarding the focus group, we have focused on the viewpoint of developers in order to provide relevant insights into trade-offs between expected positive effects and potential negative effects of GDEs. The developers’ viewpoint helped us to reveal, for instance, that part of the effects reported in the literature is unknown to the developers. Furthermore, the focus group discussions may help developers who want to create gamified software that leverages the positive effects or minimizes the negative ones. However, investigating the viewpoint of students would surely also be interesting. Thus, future work in this direction might complement the revealed insights of our study.