Rabah and Cassidy. 2018. Gamification in Education: Real Benefits or Edutainment?

Rabah and Cassidy perform a meta analysis of review literature on education in games. The following is my annotation of that paper.




This study seeks to evaluate a broad variety of review literature on gamification in education in order to establish a consensus of the effectiveness of research in such a practice. In addition, it seeks to identify flaws or blind spots in the current research on the effectiveness of gamification. Gamification is defined as, “the use of game design elements characteristic for games (rather than play or playfulness) in non-game contexts”, or applying elements of video games to other situations, such as learning. It finds that gamification is a factor in many positive learning outcomes, such as lowering anxiety, boosting knowledge retention, and building communities. It also concludes that more research on the topic is needed, especially concerning how specific game mechanics connect to specific design principles.

This study performed a qualitative analysis of review literature on gamification in education published from 2014 to 2018. 54 Reviews were found by filtering a google search with a Boolen AND search of specific terms related to education and gamification. Articles were then found when they met criteria of being recently published, pertaining to higher education, using gamification for education, etc. until the 10 most relevant were found. These 10 reviews were analyzed for their findings on the effectiveness of gamification in education and were framed by three questions: 1) What are the types of outcomes currently used to decide effectiveness? 2) What are the types of game design elements used to decide effectiveness? 3) What limitations can be addressed to better inform discourse over effectiveness?

This study primarily focuses on the shortcomings of recent reviews centered around gamification in education. Both this and Ortiz’s ”Gamification in Higher Education and STEM: A Systematic Review of Literature” highlight the impact of student’s individuality on gamification.

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