I wrote a post about my experience playing “Words with Friends” and how my intrinsic desire to play the game was undermined by the offer of digital badges.
Laura Chapman wisely related my e periencevto the growing trend to introduce video games into the classroom and incentivize students with digital badges.
She writes:
“The “gamification of education” is one aspect of the effort to shove apps and software into schools, call it personalized learning while teaching lessons about competition not unlike those Diane reports in this blog.
“Here is a recent study, and not the only one, where the gamification feature does not produce gains in learninng.
Computers & Education
Volume 80, January 2015, Pages 152-161 by Michael D. Hanus and Jesse Fox
“Gamification, the application of game elements to non-game settings, continues to grow in popularity as a method to increase student engagement in the classroom.
“We tested students across two courses, measuring their motivation, social comparison, effort, satisfaction, learner empowerment, and academic performance at four points during a 16-week semester.
“One course received a gamified curriculum, featuring a leaderboard and badges, whereas the other course received the same curriculum without the gamified elements.
“Our results found that students in the gamified course showed less motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment over time than those in the non-gamified class. The effect of course type on students’ final exam scores was mediated by students’ levels of intrinsic motivation, with students in the gamified course showing less motivation and lower final exam scores than the non-gamified class.
“This suggests that some care should be taken when applying certain gamification mechanics to educational settings.
“I scanned several other studies. Middle school students, for example, showed initial interest in game-like presentations of content, but they lost interest in the “do this and get a badge, or try again” formula thinly disguised as quests or adventures.
“Younger students in gamified classrooms are learning less about content and more about their status relative to peers in a computer display and dashboard environment that is the equivalent of a class list with stars for “good students” and nothing at all for others. The great variation is gold, silver, and bronze stars. The badge system for “competency based personalized education” is marketed as if revolutionary. I think not.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This work showing “gamification” lessening educational motivation and achievement is wonderful, and re-enforces Alfie Kohn’s summary of literature (Punishing with Rewards is a good place to start) to establish that external motivators, rewards, destroy what developmental psychologists call intrinsic motivation – you do what makes sense to you, and you have the sense to know what counts. The challenge of teaching (and of life) is to find that which is worth our time and effort regardless of what others think. Mother Teresa is revered not because of her fashion sense (blue and white fly only in Greece), but because she undertook a task few saw as worthwhile but which meant everything to her – giving the discarded and suffering love. We need a Mother Teresa who understands the shallow lives of many, lifts them from the horror of a poorly purposed life filled with things and with anger, and gives them love, the capacity to love, and a soul.
This needs a Grand Theft Auto approach. No stars and no achievement messages. Or Super Mario for the more fainthearted.
Just lots of death and destruction, eh.
Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that what the good ol USofA is the best in the world at? The death and destruction organization/machine that is the US Military and the accompanying military industrial complex.
You need to jump on this gamification bit, Duane. It’s just another form of grading and ranking.
I concur that gamification is just another glitzy supposed assessment practice. Pavlovian and Skinnerian at the same time, eh! No need for free thought and being, just follow the “game plan”.
Alfie Kohn compiled many such studies and wrote a book snout I decades ago!! It’s time for us to look it up and republish!
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Diane When I was in first grade (I am 70), the teacher had a big chart with all of our names on it, and bright shiny stars after each name for particular achievements.
Also, I went to my grandchildren’s soccer games yesterday and was thinking about all of the volunteer coaches, “soccer moms” who organize and bringing oranges, phone trees, group pool parties, etc. None of those people get paid; they do it because they love their children and the game itself; and I would guess that most recognize ALL of the good educational pluses that remain hidden in that whole game experience, for all involved. Their motivation is intrinsic. This experience (soccer, baseball, etc.) is happening all over the nation in every town and city; there is nothing NOT personalized about it; and there is a general-fungible model to be found in it that has nothing to do with privatization and the bells-and-whistles associated with technology-gone-wild.
BTW, my ten-year-old granddaughter has 36 kids in her (public education) classroom. She does okay from what I can tell. But I have to wonder what it would be like, and how her motivation would be influenced, if the teacher had only 15 or so students.
Also, privatization and the current hype about “personalized” learning is like putting golden band-aids on a festering wound without curing the infection. The band-aids are (a) technology-gone-wild and (b) the entire privatization movement. The wound is the present situation in public schools that only begins with the teacher-student ratio and that, lo-and-behold, in spite of that many-sided situation, they do a good job anyway.
IF nothing changed in the public schools (like leaving the too-large classes), and IF a private company took over, that takeover wouldn’t change what everyone agrees already needs work in public schools. It’s not privatization as such that helps. Even if they did do better in some cases, it’s not the privatization but the smaller classes and cherry-picked students that feed the statistics and not that they are privatized or have better technology (<–apparently, they don’t in many cases?) The hidden “improvement” is that their ugly idea of “improvement” is hidden under all of the hype and money: whether oligarchs know it or not, it’s really the solidification of social and economic class (and in some cases like DeVos, religious-ideological power) drawn around some suspiciously undemocratic boundaries; and fed to the public on a similarly-golden plate. (Think of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf dressed in Grandma’s clothes.)
Further, if you numerized the broader but real incremental goods that occur in neighborhood public schools, they would far outshine private companies by far. And THAT’s not even talking about the foundational and curriculum issues (e.g., public institutions’ intimate connection with our democratic political ground), which we have discussed at length on this site.
Postman and Weingarten circa early 1970s: Children come with built in crap detectors. From Teaching As A Subversive Activity. Kids know when they are being incentivized rather than engaged. Vygotsky understands how thought and language develop I believe: genuine experiences that help move us forward with support (either through demonstration, observation, approximation etc.) rather than constant monitoring and external rewards. Brain resesrch shows that we are designed to note the unusual or new (for all kinds of reasons from survival to stimulation). Thus if nurtured to grow in our most nature- compatible way we need to build our own brains under the watchful eye of caring elders (including here older siblings along with adults). I am constantly flabbergasted by those who do not truly know psychology, human growth and development, neuroscience, teaching, history of learning ie from Aristotle on up, education etc. and who have never or barely taught students so as to become a master teacher, who think they have a lock on what will magically move all forward. We certainly need to be tech savvy and use technology for the good of all. But not at the expense of what makes us human (and here I am talking about giving all the chance for a free, fair, safe, productive, decent at the least, existence.) And different strokes for different folks. I say required reading: Brian Cambourne’s Conditions of Learning, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, William Glasser’s Choice Theory and The Quality School, Peter Johnston’s Opening Minds and Lev Vygotsky’s Thought and Language. For starters. Balance is another key. Teachers need to be decision makers, expert cognitive theorists, knowlegable about best practices, relationship experts and hard workers. We make huge mistakes thinking that productive, reasoned, masterful “teaching” (I prefer “guiders of learning” ) comes easily and cheap. Until teaching is a true profession our children are prey to ill-advised decisions and decision-makers. Very sad.
So true. Students will not easily tolerate a boring, rote behaviorist approach to learning for long. They will rebel, and I hope they do. Electronic “worksheets” offer training rather than real education. Young people need connections and feedback from others, and the truly big ideas foster discussion. No, these people know nothing about neuroscience, education or psychology. They only know how to make money.
retired teacher,
I will write this again: You should be Secretary of Education.
Add Andre Comte-Sponville’s “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues” to your list of pre-service (and in service) teacher’s reading.
Video games are “fun” because they feed the illusion of motion and fantasy to the brain. A gamer can pretend to fly, to fire projectiles at a target, to have superhuman strength, flexibility, or beauty, and so on. Collecting badges becomes addictive only after the illusion has become addictive. The gaming industry knows this. Games without the illusion are not marketable. When edupreneurs try to apply badges to learning math or science, they fail to take the need for illusion of motion and fantasy into account. That’s why gamification of education will always fail. Only interpersonal interactions in classrooms provide the necessary neural stimuli to make learning happen. We really “don’t need no stinking badges,” but that’s just the half of it. Our brains don’t WANT no stinking badges. We want smiling, happy parents, teachers, coaches, and friends after we have overcome a challenge, not trophies. Trophies don’t really matter. Grades don’t really matter. Play is social learning, and gaming is not social.
But the games yield the data they want to evaluate the “success” of the impact investments. There’s the rub. That is why this transition to digital platforms is happening. The games are to draw out the behavioral/mindset data. I was at an all day workshop yesterday in Philadelphia for the New Frontier Workshop. It wasn’t about education per se. The focus was edgy art/film AR/VR immersive transmedia experiences. On the surface it seemed like they were looking to lift up marginalized voices. But you have to wonder about the push to create “empathy” via an Oculus Rift experiment. If they are data-mining gamified education experiences, what types of data can be mind from a person interact with an virtual environment? I truly believe PFS will extend well beyond education to mental health treatment and maybe even cross over into behavior modification/behavioral economics/the “nudge.” Make it easy on people to acquire “good” habits of mind, etc. I ended up talking with the “speculative neuroscientist” at at the end of the event. She was a POC and actually very open to my concerns. She gave me her email and I hope we can continue to talk. Imagine if Leni Riefenstahl had had an Oculus Rift. Imagine Steven Bannon (who has a film background among other things) with an Oculus Rift. You really think those in power are going to use these tools mostly for “good?” I have my doubts.
I had to look up ‘speculative neuroscience’. Apparently, it’s when a medical doctor falls from grace and breaks away from science into corporate marketing, based on the idea that future human brains will be hybridized with computer hardware. Whew, that’s a dooozy! Nowadays, people can make money selling magic beans as long as they say the beans were made by ‘technology’.
It’s also a measure of the political clout the tech industry has within ed reform.
None of this stuff is even questioned. Any dissent or criticism is immediately shut down with “protecting the status quo!”.
They swallowed the utterly ridiculous “digital natives” whole. They all repeated a carefully crafted marketing term like parrots.
It’s weird to say but I don’t have faith in “our leaders” but I do have faith that children have a nearly fool-proof BS detector and they know when a “game” is actually a “skills assessment”.
Chiara Yes–a built-in BS detector. Children have an inherent ability to recognition when “play” is for and about them and not for someone else or some other purpose.
It’s about means and ends–in child’s play, the child is both the means and the ends. If adults understand the self-developmental principles and functions at work, then “good them.” But in actual playing, the child still just develops along a built-in set of directives regardless of what we know about it.
Think of a school playground or a park or a swimming pool. The broad outlines of safety and the invitation to play in specific ways (like climbing, swimming, etc.) are built-in and preserved by the wise guidance of adults, parents, and teachers. But that’s all. I do think there is some element of that in gaming–but again, YOU DON’T LEAVE A CHILD AT THE PLAYGROUND OR POOL ALL WEEK FOR A REASON; NOR DO YOU CONVERT ALL OF EDUCATION INTO A GAMING SITUATION.
There’s a HEUGGGEEE oversight going on at the crossroads where technocrats meet education. It’s a flashy and very dangerous quick-fix fad, and I fear they cannot see it or all of the manipulators that are feeding the frenzy.
The US Department of Education is heading off on another taxpayer funded “public schools suck!” tour next week.
Are ed reformers barred from entering a US public school? Do they get kicked out of the ed reform club if they support the unfashionable public schools that 90% of kids attend?
http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/mary-sanchez/article172141707.html
It’s ridiculous that we have a federal government that is opposed to the schools most families attend. Ed reform can spin this any way they want but these public employees aren’t serving “the public”- they’re serving a very specific political agenda that excludes 90% of US families.
That’s outrageous and we shouldn’t be forced to pay for it. I want one person on the payroll in DC who has some interest in existing US public schools. 90% of families should have ONE advocate.
I don’t play too many games online. I do play Words with Friends but could care less about badges. I play to learn new words and chat with friends from all over. We really need to stop giving our children so many rewards.
Real learning only takes place when motivation becomes internal.
Video games provide external motivation only.
Most video games are also very destructive because they place an emphasis on winning – and beating others in games involving more than one person. There is little emphasis on team work and cooperation.
This is really common sense, though there are obviously a lot of people who have no common sense who have bought into the whole education as game thing.
Really, the whole effort to gamify education is just another “angle” on the part of tech companies to sell computer hardware and software.