Class of Oz: role-play gamification integrated into classroom management motivates elementary students to learn

ABSTRACT

In previous research, gamified classroom management has been found to improve high school students’ classroom participation. This study applied gamification classroom management through a “Class of Oz” in an elementary school to cultivate students’ learning. Two classes were randomly assigned to the experimental group, and the other two were randomly assigned to the control group. Eighty-three valid samples were retained after deleting incomplete data from the pre- and post-test. After 11 weeks of gamified classroom management, the results indicated that the experimental group experienced a higher value and emotion of learning motivation than the control group. However, there were no differences between the Chinese and mathematics scores of the two groups. In addition, qualitative observations showed that gamified classroom management attracted students’ attention and improved their learning motivation. These results revealed that role-play gamified classroom management could enhance students’ learning motivation without affecting their academic performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom management
• gamification
• learning motivation
• academic performance
• elementary student

Data availability statement

Data can be accessed by contacting the corresponding author.

Ethical approval statement

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the “Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan. This work was also supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number 106-2410-H-003-135-MY3 and MOST109-2628-H-003-005-MY2].

Notes on contributors

Pei-Zhen Chen

Pei-Zhen Chen is a PhD Candidate at creativity in the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. Her research areas include creativity measures, executive function, and cognitive neuropsychology. Her research interests mainly concern the test development and cognitive process for creative problem-solving.

Ting-Chieh Chang

Ting-Chieh Chang is a Master in education at the In-service Master Program of Creativity Development at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. Her research interest is the design of the gamified activity and classroom management in primary school.

Ching-Lin Wu

Ching-Lin Wu is an associate Professor at cognitive psychology in the Program of Learning Sciences at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. His current research is on co-creativity, especially individual creative problem-solving in the interactive situations from the behavioral and neuroscience perspectives. His second line of research is on the intervention integrating learning technology and creativity. A third line of research is humor and mental health in school life.