Understanding how educational gamification impacts users' behavior: a theoretical analysis

Abstract

Owing to the rapid development of gamification studies, more and more research started to consider involving game mechanics into instruction designs. Educational gamification introduced a new approach for impacting users' behaviors. Here, this study proposed the idea of figuring out the mechanism of how educational gamification impacts users' behavior. After reviewing behavior related educational gamification studies and the motivations of human behavior, this study analyzed the potential influencing factors based on the framework of the theory of planned behavior. According to the theoretical analysis, this article emphasized the significance of motivating users both intrinsically and extrinsically depends on specific cases. Then, users' attitude towards the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control were found having possibility in mediating educational gamification designs and users' behavior. Also, it was suggested that educational gamification designers need to adjust users' game flow experience and cognitive load properly in design practices. Limitations and future study recommendations of this article are presented in the end.