Gamification is the key to helping teachers implement personalized learning because “gamified environments are ideal for mastery learning[;] allowing students to repeatedly practice skills to meet learning outcomes” (Kingsley & Grabner-Hagen, p. 553). Research shows that gamification increases learner engagement, motivation, and critical thinking. Furthermore, games offer challenges to learners and are the best way to support student agency, student identity, and student “productive” power.
According to Moje and Lewis (2007), student agency is the making and remaking of the students’ self, identity, and relationships. According to the Merriam-Dictionary, agency is defined as “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.” Hence, gamification places learners in a role, condition, or state in which they have to exert their power through decision making, perseverance, leadership, and critical thinking.
Moje and Lewis (2007) submitted that Student identity is a continuous formation of the student acting as a subject within a community. In other words, how students behave, speak, and function ultimately forms the basis of the students’ identity. Hence, gamification requires that learners act as a particular subject in a particular discourse community. Strictly speaking, depending upon the goals of the learning quest, learners have to function in a particular role in order to successfully complete the learning goals of the quest. They must also understand the context, nomenclature, and linguistic rules of the discourse community within the quest. What is more, gamification places learners in a variety of roles and discourse communities that they would not otherwise be.
Student “productive” power, as defined by Moje and Lewis (2007), is not only having the skill and will to achieve learning goals, but also having independent thought and autonomous action towards self-regulated learning and self-directed learning. Hence, gamification capitalizes on autonomy, learner choice, and learner control.
In sum, gamification shows learners that failure is not final… As a matter of fact, the repetitive activity of games supports perpetual skill building and leaves little time for players to sulk in failure. Much like gaming, personalized learning environments allow students to be immersed in a rich learning experience that yields multiple outcomes of learning, thus generating a learning constellation progression of knowledge and skills. If educators really want to implement personalized learning in their classrooms, then they will need to consider gamification.
Reference:
Kingsley, Tara L. & Grabner-Hagen, Melissa M. (2017). Vocabulary by Gamification. The Reading Teacher. 71. doi:10.1002/trtr.1645.
Moje, E. B., & Lewis, C. (2007). Examining opportunities to learn literacy: The role of critical sociocultural literacy research. In. C. J. Lewis, P. Enciso, & E. B. Moje (Eds.), Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency, and power. (pp. 15-48). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
