How do you gamify assessment and feedback in your teaching?

Gamification, the integration of game-like elements into non-game contexts, has proven effective in assessment and feedback in educational settings. By turning evaluations into interactive experiences, gamification can boost student engagement and motivation. It provides instant feedback, enabling students to understand their performance and areas for improvement in real-time. Additionally, the competitive and rewarding nature of games can make the learning and assessment process more enjoyable and meaningful, leading to better retention and comprehension.

Gamified assessment and feedback revolutionise the traditional educational evaluation process by infusing it with game mechanics like points, badges, or leaderboards. This approach not only invigorates the assessment landscape but also makes feedback mechanisms more interactive and immediate. The gamified elements serve to heighten student engagement, providing a more enjoyable and stimulating learning environment. They offer explicit goals and progression indicators, which guide students toward focused learning outcomes. Moreover, the competitive or collaborative features in gamified assessments can drive motivation, encouraging students to self-regulate their learning behaviour.

Do you remember those Kellogg's commercials that said "part of this complete breakfast"? This is true about gamified assessment. It can be very impactful for the reasons stated by the article, and the other folks commenting, but it is only a part of a full program. Take math for example - DreamBox and IXL have gamified platforms that are motivating, adaptive to student performance and have strong progress indicators and feedback. However, they aren't sufficient for robust learning of mathematics. Just part of a complete program.

In any type of game design, user feedback is important for ongoing refinement. I'd run small-scale pilot tests of the gamified elements before a full implementation. This allows for real-world feedback from learners that can help adjust the difficulty levels of challenges, the balance between competitive and collaborative elements, or even the types of rewards offered. Data from these tests can offer actionable insights to better align the gamified aspects with learning outcomes. This would increase both engagement and the educational impact of the gamified assessment.

Great notes about student and standards based design, which is critical. There's another consideration I would keep in mind when designing gamified math assessment and feedback, specifically about the assessment tasks they engage in. Make sure that the tasks require students to make connections across different mathematical models and when possible to actually "do mathematics" meaning they should engage in rigorous tasks that demand problem solving and connection making instead of engaging in doing procedures that don't require connections. For example, students shouldn't just be asked for the answers to a multiplication problem, they should create or identify an area model that matches the equation and generate an equation that matches.

Gamified elements can support differentiated instruction. Because students engage with gamified elements at their own pace and based on their own choices, teachers can gather data that highlights individual learning preferences and areas for improvement. This can be useful for adapting instruction to meet diverse learning needs. Gamified elements often include a variety of activities that appeal to different learning styles and learning needs, making the educational environment more inclusive.

Another potential drawback could be the one-size-fits-all trap where the gamified elements that engage one subset of students may disengage another. This can inadvertently widen the achievement gap or contribute to inequalities in the classroom. The time and resources needed for proper design, implementation, and ongoing adjustments should be properly considered and planned for. It's not just about incorporating game elements; it's about continually refining them to better serve educational objectives. Because of this, teachers may find it burdensome to maintain and update the gamified elements alongside their long list of other responsibilities.

Be sure to use the gamified assessment and feedback platform or program yourself as the educator. It will help you understand what students are being required to do and the manner in which the platform presents material AND it may help identify the strengths of the student. A quick math example is that if students are able to successfully do division problems in the platform but unable to do so in their classwork. You might find after using the platform that the way the material is presented allows them to use a multiplication strategy to solve (e.g. treating the division problem like a missing factor problem) but they aren't making that connection in classwork. This will allow you to leverage their strengths and teach for transfer.