Gamification and Cognitive Science
Gamification and Cognitive Science
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #34
Hello all, and welcome to another update!
I recently listened to an interesting podcast by
. Cody was interviewing Dr. Adrian Hon, the author of a recent book about gamification titled ‘You’ve Been Played’.If you have tried learning apps such as Duolingo (as I have), I think you’ll find the conversation interesting! Spoiler alert: it’s not a hugely positive take on gamifying learning.
This is an interesting topic to me for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I’m interested in the assumptions people make about this strategy. At least in my experience, gamification seems to be widely accepted as a generally good idea in education… but should it be? It could be worth more scrutiny.
I’m also interested in how gaming affects learning, and whether it can have an impact on things like memory and motivation.
The Desirable Difficulties Argument
Many of you will be at least somewhat familiar with the idea of desirable difficulties. Making learning more challenging (at least, when done in an evidence-based way) is often the route to making it more effective.
Learning apps, at least on the face of it, seem to move in the opposite direction. They try to make learning almost effort-free.
To be fair, Duolingo makes a point of employing learning science (at least, they claim to), and it uses the spacing effect—review after a delay is built into the code (this is also the case with some other learning apps, such as Quizlet).
And any quizzing app is potentially making use of retrieval practice.
So there could be a mixed bag here. While it’s good to see spacing and retrieval being applied, my concern would be that easy is not always good, and that simplification can go against other cognitive principles such as meaningful, active learning.
As Cody said on his podcast, learning a language is hard, and it’s probably not going to happen by practising a handful of words and phrases on an app once a day.
The Metacognitive Element
Then we can consider metacognition. Specifically: what do learners think about their learning when it is gamified? Do they believe they are learning better?
In line with what I said about reading a few weeks ago, it seems entirely possible that learners mistakenly believe they are learning better when the experience feels easier. However, I am not aware of any research that has tested that hypothesis in this specific context. I’ll have a look around, and hopefully say more about this in future.
One other thing to consider is how we learn metacognitive strategies. If the app is making most or all of the choices for you (what to study, when to study, etc), then we are bypassing an important aspect of metacognition. This could be helpful, because we know that learners often make flawed choices.
But at the same time, how do we learn how to learn if we never get a chance to engage in these choices? To me, this is a risk of too much gamification.
Nudge Psychology
Nudge psychology is the idea that people are more motivated by subtle prompts, hints, reminders and simplifications than they are by rewards and punishments.
Games and apps use all kinds of nudges, from points to leaderboards to push notifications to social proof.
Nudges have created a lot of debate, in part because governments and corporations may use them without our awareness. However, I feel that as long as nudges are not covert, they don’t need to be morally questionable. I can choose to use a nudge to motivate myself, for example, or a teacher can use a nudge while also telling their class they are doing so.
I will explain the theory more fully in a future update, but for now I’ll just say that it’s an obvious benefit of (well-designed) gamified learning.
Reviews
Overall, the reviews of the evidence of gamification in the classroom tend to be pretty positive, but they focus more on motivation than on learning. In one of the more recent papers, Majuri et al (2018) highlight the popular use of leaderboards, badges, experience points, and the like. They note that while these seem to have mostly beneficial effects, more social approaches are underused, and also that mixed qualitative results suggest that these approaches didn’t motivate everyone.
This fits with my understanding. It also seems to me that reward-type approaches are a little short-lived. Teachers and students can tire of leaderboards quite quickly.
Imagine if we were given points or placed on a leaderboard for our own professional learning. It might provide some short-term motivation, but it’s probably not going to deepen your understanding or help you remember things any better.
For more lasting motivation, people need to buy in, and think, ‘this is important to me’. And when it comes to learning, we do need some kind of metacognitive understanding of what we are doing, and why.
I hope you found that interesting. I’d be interested to hear about your own experiences with gamification, too. Do you agree that it is often viewed a little uncritically?
Also, I’m aware this piece ended up rather long… my next emails will be a return to more ‘bite sized’ updates!
All the best for the week ahead,
Jonathan
Last week: Generative Classroom Strategies, pt. 2
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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