Game-based learning and Gamification to promote engagement and motivation in medical learning contexts

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Identifying Motivational Styles in Educational Gamification

Little work has been done to understand the motivational impact of specific game elements and how they combine to form student motivational styles in educational gamification. In this exploratory study we evaluate the level of motivation reported for a variety of game elements by 184 students. Using this data we generated a principle components analysis to identify the underlying factor structure that govern students’ motivational styles. Four motivational styles were identified: (1) Personal Progress – being motivated by gamified elements that show one’s individual progress in a course; (2) Competition and Praise – being motivated by game elements that show one’s progress compared to their peers and provide social reinforcing feedback; (3) Individual Assignments – being motivated by completing traditional assignments and exams; and (4) Group Work – being motivated by social assignments like group work and peer review

Impact of Gamification on Student Engagement in Graduate Medical Studies

Rapid technological advances have created major societal changes, transformed business sectors, and revolutionized enterprises. In contrast, the curricular structure of medical education has remained unchanged for the last 100 years, and, for the most part, medical education has been reluctant to embrace the use of technology. The prevalent pedagogical model is reliant on rote memorization. The conceptual framework that informed this study was the user-centered framework for meaningful gamification. This framework\u27s components are organismic integration theory, situational relevance, situated motivational affordance, and the universal design for learning. This quantitative study focused on key research questions related to identifying whether significant increases occurred over time in cooperative learning, cognitive level, and personal skills \u27the dependent variables\u27 when using a gamified learning method-the independent variable. The validated Student Engagement Survey was used to collect data from second-year medical students in a Southern California medical school, with N = 64. A repeated measures MANOVA with follow-up univariate ANOVAs was used, and statistical results indicated that there were significant differences over time in cooperative learning, cognitive level, and personal skills when using gamified learning methods. This research was conducted over a period of 3 months, divided into 3 Time Periods (TP). For all three variables, significant increases were noticed between TP 1 and TP 2, followed by significant decreases between TP 2 and TP 3. These findings pointed to the fact that more studies are needed to better understand whether certain types of gamification implementations are detrimental to student engagement in medical education, or whether more sound design principles ought to be explored to produce effective gamified learning components that could positively impact student engagement in medical education