Rachels and Rockinson. 2018. The effects of a mobile gamification app on elementary students’ Spanish achievement and self-efficacy.

Rachels and Rockinson determine the effectiveness of an Spanish learning game Doulingo. The following is my annotation of their paper.



This study seeks to compare a gamification app that provides Spanish language instruction called Duolingo and a traditional classroom environment in order to determine both method’s effectiveness at teaching elementary students spanish. By exposing two different groups of students to the different methods of spanish learning and then comparing the knowledge gained by the students through a test and learning scales, the study found there is no significant difference in the results of both learning processes. This led to the conclusion that Duolingo can be a useful tool in elementary level spanish acquisition, as it is effective as traditional face-to-face instruction.

This study was performed at a private school in florida. It randomly assigned 2 third-grade classes and 3 fourth-grade foreign language classes to be taught spanish through duolingo instruction and 3 third-grade classes and 3 fourth-grade foreign language classes to be taught spanish through traditional face-to-face methods. Both groups attended a 40 minute class once a week for 12 weeks. After removing students that were bilingual or provided incomplete data sets, the study had 167 student cases to be analysed, where 79 were taught by duolingo and 88 were taught by traditional methods. An additional 3 cases were removed later on. Researchers developed a test to record educational achievement based on the content in the Duolingo lessons and traditional classroom curriculum. Students were required to complete the test before and after their 12 weeks of lessons in order to measure their academic growth. In order to control for individual student’s motivation and behavior, an Academic efficiency subscale was used to identify each student's individual traits.

This study primarily focused on the difference in elementary spanish education achievement between students taught by an online spanish learning app and traditional classroom methods. It finds there is no significant difference in learning outcomes between students who learn using educational game software and students who learn in a classroom, similar to the findings of Peterson in “Implicit corrective feedback in computer-guided interaction: Does mode matter ?”

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