Measurement of the effects of e-learning courses gamification on motivation and satisfaction of students

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a study which was conducted in two stages. The first part of the paper contains literature search findings and analyzes the existing self-assessment scales for measuring motivation and satisfaction of students that were developed by other authors. In the second part of our study we created a battery of self-assessment measures for collecting data for an overarching set of gamification-related constructs/variables selected in accordance to those that are reported in literature). These scales were constructed by (a) adaptation and improvement of items from existing measures and (b) creation of novel items for measures of constructs that were found to be important in research articles on gamification and educational games. The initial empirical evaluation of this new questionnaire (battery of assessment scales) was performed on a large convenience sample of students (N=201) who attended a hybrid course on computer programming. These respondents were divided into an experimental group, which used gamified e-learning course material, and a control group, which used a parallel (non-gamified) version of the e-learning course with equal theoretical content/For each self-assessment scale of the questionnaire Cronbach alpha coefficients were calculated and the scales were slightly corrected to improve their internal consistency. We report the results concerning the effects of gamification on motivation and satisfaction, which were measured by respective assessment scales.