Findings of an Experiment: Knowledge Retention in Gamified and Non-Gamified Workshops

Abstract

Apathetic and poorly motivated students require educators to redesign their educational measures in order to create inspiring learning environments. One such educational measure is gamification, a new tool for active learning to improve students’ motivation, with the ultimate goal of increasing knowledge retention. In this paper we investigate the effects of gamification on short- and long-term knowledge gains. Moreover, the moderating effects of gender and school type are scrutinized. We conducted a longitudinal study with 384 students using three assessments at different times and compared the results from gamified and non-gamified workshops. Our findings indicate that gamification is an effective tool to increase students’ knowledge retention in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term. There was no significant effect of gender, but we found some preliminary evidence that school type might have a moderating effect on knowledge retention.