How competitive, cooperative, and collaborative gamification impacts student learning and engagement

Gamification is an increasingly popular approach to engage learners in educational contexts. Although many studies have examined the effects of gamification in comparison to a non-gamification approach, less attention has been paid to the impact of different ways of implementing gamification on students’ learning and engagement. In this study, we performed a quasi-experiment on the competitive, cooperative, and collaborative types of gamification among secondary school students who learn English as a foreign language. The quantitative results indicate students in the competitive condition significantly outperformed their peers in the cooperative condition on a reading-related skill (morphological awareness), word reading, and reading comprehension. They also had higher gains in morphological awareness than students in the collaborative condition, although these two groups showed similar improvement in far-transfer measures (i.e., word reading and reading comprehension). Concerning engagement, qualitative data collected from interviews suggested gamification contributed to students’ behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement. The qualitative data also reflected the possible reasons for the quantitative results. We conclude that cooperative and collaborative gamification should be designed carefully and take various factors into account (e.g., establishing shared goals and rewards, emphasising individual and collective contributions, and collaboration training) to ensure that the gamification approach does not hinder student learning.