From top to bottom: How positions on different types of leaderboard may affect fully online student learning performance, intrinsic motivation, and course engagement

Gamification Design to Increase Motivation in Online Learning Environments: A Systematic Review

“…Reviewed articles looked into the relationship between gamification and motivation from the perspective of Self Determination Theory, ARCS model of motivation, Flow Theory, cognitive, emotional, social areas and social comparison. Except one, which did not find any negative or positive effects (Kyewski & Krämer, 2018), the rest of the studies revealed that gamification could be effective in facilitating motivation in online learning environments by supporting the feeling of relatedness, competence and autonomy -the fundamentals of SDT (Bai et al 2021;Boverman et al, 2018;Li & Chu, 2021;Pilkington, 2018;van Roy & Zaman, 2018) and the sense of flow and engagement (Çağlar-Özhan & Arkün-Kocadere, 2020). Game elements are motivating for students in terms of getting feedback from the instructor (Boverman et al, 2018) observing their own progress (Li & Chu, 2021;Boverman et al, 2018), being rewarded for their actions (Domínguez et al, 2013), and creating a competitive environment (Bai et al, 2021;Pilkington, 2018).…”

“…The study concluded that gamified e-learning platforms had emotional and social effects on students and could improve student motivation. Bai et al (2021) approached the topic within the perspective of social comparison and analyzed the effects of absolute leaderboard and relative leaderboard on students' intrinsic motivation. While in an absolute leaderboard students can see all of the students' names, exact positions, profile photos and points; in a relative leaderboard they see the relative positions of their five neighbor students, their profile photos, names and points.…”

“…Furthermore, in relative leaderboard settings, most of the low-ranked students find public comparison better because they can compare themselves with the ones who are close to them in terms of skills and abilities. In order to alleviate sadness of students who are not content with the leaderboard, top-five students can be shown on the absolute leaderboard, leaderboards can be renewed every two weeks, or absolute leaderboards and relative leaderboards can be used interchangeably each term (Bai et al, 2021).…”

“…The study found that in the adaptive system, students' motivation increased significantly. Considering individual differences, researchers pointed out using competition mechanisms carefully to avoid the diminishing effect of competition on motivation because some students do not like the idea of publicly competing with friends and find it demotivating (Bai et al 2021;Domínguez et al, 2013;Kyewski & Krämer, 2018). In this regard using it with collaboration could help lessen the negative effects of competition on students who like collaborative works (Çağlar-Özhan & Arkün-Kocadere, 2020) or designing game elements which let students to see or not to see each other's achievements or badges (Kyewski & Krämer, 2018).…”

More challenging or more achievable? The impacts of difficulty and dominant goal orientation in leaderboards within educational gamification

“…Thus, the feedback valence difference between the two conditions was so great that it neutralized the opposite effect brought by the goal difficulty, resulting in the increased difficulty failing to promote performance. Additionally, the above studies were based on the relative leaderboards, which only presented rankings and performance of the learners themselves and surrounding opponents (Bai et al, 2021; Ortiz‐Rojas et al, 2019). Learners might not be seriously threatened when experiencing high difficulty in the relative leaderboard as only similar‐performance opponents were displayed.…”