A study on the impact of gamification on students’ behavior and performance through learning paths

Gamification has been widely employed in educational contexts to improve students’ engagement and enhance the learning process. In this sense, the present work investigates the impact of gamification on students’ behavior and performance through learning paths, i.e., sequences of learning objects followed by students while interacting with a virtual learning environment. To achieve this, we captured, analyzed and visually represented learning paths from 139 students enrolled in an online course. As result, we observed that students using gamification interacted more with the course elements, had longer paths and better grades. The main contribution of this work is to present learning paths as a tool to investigate students’ interaction in a virtual learning environment with gamified elements and to analyze these elements’ impact on students’ behavior and performance.