Can Gamification Improve the Benefits of Student Response Systems in Learning? An Experimental Study

Student response systems (SRSs) are becoming popular among instructors in nearly all levels of learning. The benefits of using SRSs in terms of attendance, attention, participation, or motivation have been shown in many studies. Moreover, several studies demonstrate that the use of some kind of gaming techniques in education are useful to stimulate students to learn in wider, longer, and deeper ways. This paper analyzes whether the integration of both SRSs and gaming techniques leads to better results in motivation, attention, engagement, and learning performance than SRSs alone. For this purpose, a new tool has been developed for conducting an experimental study with students from different subjects and from different academic levels. A randomized post-test-only control group analysis was conducted to evaluate the impact of the gamified SRS. In addition, a multivariate three-way factorial design has been performed considering three relevant factors: 1) learning tool (non-gamified SRS or gamified SRS); 2) study type; and 3) gender. The main finding is that students who took lecture sessions with a gamified SRS had more positive perceptions with respect to motivation, attention, and learning performance than students who took lecture sessions with a non-gamified SRS.