Investigating High School Students' Perceptions of Digital Badges in Afterschool Learning

Abstract

This paper investigates high school students' perceptions of the opportunities and challenges of using digital badges to recognize and reward the skills and achievements they acquire in an afterschool science education program. Focus groups and usability tests were conducted with 10 students during the design of a badge system prototype for use in the program. We found that students recognized opportunities for personal empowerment in their use of badges, but also expressed concerns about sharing badges in various online contexts. The findings provide new insight into the values and goals that learners bring to discussions of digital badges in education. These insights hold relevance for designers of education-based badge systems as well as educators seeking to introduce badges into their practice.

Gamifying education: what is known, what is believed and what remains uncertain: a critical review

“…This search yielded a total of 4998 results depicted in Table 1. We have chosen the definition of (Deterding et al, 2011) for gamification ("the use of game design elements in non-gaming contexts") to measure each found publication for relevance. Accordingly, publications discussing full-fledged games were filtered out.…”

“…At university level, 1 study has reported results involving graduate students (Nevin et al, 2014), while at K-12 level, 3 studies have reported results involving elementary school students (Boticki, Baksa, Seow, & Looi, 2015;Simoes, Mateus, Redondo, & Vilas, 2015; , 2 studies have reported results involving middle school students (Attali & Arieli-Attali, 2015;Long & Aleven, 2014 ) and 2 studies have reported results involving high school students (Davis & Klein, 2015;Paiva, Barbosa, Batista, Pimentel, & Bittencourt, 2015). A possible explanation of this disproportion is that perhaps it is easier for college instructors to experiment with using gamification in their own courses.…”

“…The category "Others" includes studies with unspecified subjects, where the gamified activities are independent of a subject and the focus is on: the platform supporting gamification Davis & Klein, 2015;Mekler et al, 2015), the game elements used Pedro et al, 2015a), a personal learning environment , measurements or learners' personalities .…”

“…In an attempt to best capture the essence of the underlying concepts and practices, the term gamification has been defined in several ways, such as "the use of game design elements in nongame contexts" (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011), "the phenomenon of creating gameful experiences" (Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014), or "the process of making activities more game-like" (Werbach, 2014). Empirical work across disciplines has begun to explore how gamification can be used in certain contexts and what behavioral and experiential effects gamification has on people in the short and long terms.…”

The use of digital badges by undergraduate nursing students: A three-year study

“…What is generally acknowledged about digital badges is that they have been implemented in many educational settings to varying levels of success. A study by Davis and Klein (2015) with high school students found that digital badges were recognised as an opportunity for personal empowerment but the students had concerns about the sharing of digital badges online. In the higher education sector, digital badges have been explored as an alternative to grades (micro-credentialing) (Elliott et al, 2014); supporting the process of progressing through research degrees (Mewburn et al, 2014); assessing individual students in collaborative assignments (Moccozet, 2013); and as an introduction to navigating a physical campus through a scavenger hunt exploration (Koutropoulos, 2012).…”