Using Badging and Rewards to Boost Motivation and Empower Student Agency

• Reward System Integration: Educational technologies are increasingly incorporating digital badges and rewards to recognize student achievements and encourage continued engagement.
• Gamification Benefits: When aligned with educational objectives, gamification strategies like badging can enhance student motivation and lead to better learning outcomes.
• Strategic Badging: When designed strategically, badges and rewards can provide students with a sense of progress and achievement, enhancing motivation and enabling personalized learning experiences.

The Rise of Digital Rewards in Education

The modern-day counterpart to stars and smiley face stickers on homework assignments, digital rewards, and badges have gained significant interest and adoption in the edtech space as methods for recognizing progress and rewarding performance.

Aligning Rewards with Educational Goals for Better Motivation

While we are not unique in including a badging and rewards system in our app, our approach recognizes the potential pitfalls of such systems and aims to ensure that our badging and rewards strategies genuinely enhance the learning experience rather than just follow a trend. In turn, we have designed our system to ensure that it aligns with students’ intrinsic motivations while also providing tangible benefits to students to support their unique learning journeys.

Challenges and Criticisms of Gamified Reward Systems

Gamified systems, particularly reward-based systems, have been criticized for their potential to undermine motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment [1], or to simply have no positive effect on learning at all [2].

Study Insights: Gamification's Positive Impact on Student Success

However, there is growing evidence suggesting that when rewards are aligned with the goals of the task, they can serve as powerful motivators without detracting from the primary objectives [3].

A 2023 study [4] involving 778 7th and 8th grade mathematics students explored the impact of gamification on student motivation. The study involved students interacting with a learning platform that incorporated badges, rewards, and other gamification elements over a semester. The results showed that the gamification elements increased senses of playfulness and accomplishment, which increased immersion in the learning process, which ultimately supported both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Ultimately, students viewed the badges and rewards not just as external tokens, but as genuine markers of their progress and achievement.

Similarly, a comprehensive meta-analysis, which included 30 independent studies with a total of 3083 participants, explored the effects of gamification on educational outcomes [5]. Overall, gamification was found to have a small to medium positive effect size on student outcomes. The specific gamification features of badging and reward systems had similar effect sizes, demonstrating that systems that provide recognition of progress and/or rewards for performance significantly improve student outcomes.

A more recent study found that students who learn in digital environments enriched with badging and reward-type systems outperform students in non-gamified environments across all academic measures, including a 65% increase in persistence and a 10% increase in grades [6].

Additionally, badging and reward systems have been shown to help students develop metacognitive skills as they intuitively come to understand their individual learning styles [7]. These systems also provide educators with clear indicators of student progress [6]. Educators can then use these insights into individual student trajectories to provide more tailored instruction and individualized support [8].

Principles of Effective Gamification Design in Education

Of course, none of this is to say that gamification generally or badging and rewards systems more specifically provide any positive benefits in themselves. Effective gamification design is about designing for motivational experiences rather than designing the experiences themselves [9].

In other words, to support students' intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and confidence, gamified systems must do several things really well and all at the same time: offer meaningful choices, set achievable challenges, provide positive feedback, and be adaptable to individual preferences within a supportive environment [9].

Integrating Badging within Our User Experience Framework

This is why, within our larger user experience framework, we have designed our overall gamification strategy to leverage the benefits of badging and rewards systems while avoiding common pitfalls. Specifically, our badging and rewards system combines both badging for recognition of progress and badging for rewards for performance to maximize the potential to support student success. As a form of recognition, our badges provide students with consistent markers of achievement, providing a form of immediate feedback to encourage progress. As a form of reward, students can use their badges to personalize their own learning experiences. For example, students can unlock app customization features to individualize their learning environment, or they can access additional support tokens to help them solve more complex challenges as the curriculum progresses*.*

Addressing the Risk of Misplaced Priorities in Gamification

Despite its potential benefits, gamification can inadvertently prioritize non-essential outcomes, such as earning otherwise meaningless badges, over primary learning goals, specifically demonstrating subject matter competence [1]. At the same time, it is essential to acknowledge that students are entire persons [7]. Thus, while academic outcomes do indeed guide our work, we also acknowledge that student success is embedded within each students’ social and emotional complex. As a result, our system intentionally taps into the fundamental human desire for recognition and achievement, fostering deep senses of pride, responsibility, and agency among students.

Conclusion: Badging as a Tool for Personal and Academic Empowerment

We believe in empowering our students as whole persons. This is why our badging and rewards system is designed to both motivate students by recognizing their progress and to empower student agency by rewarding performance with tangible benefits that provide individualized benefits throughout each students’ unique learning journey. With each step of incremental progress, we want students to know–at a deeply personal level–that they can learn, that they can achieve and that they can succeed. Our badging and rewards system is just one way we communicate to students our belief in their potential.

References

[1] Hanus, M. D. & Fox, J. (2015). Assessing the effects of gamification in the classroom: A longitudinal study on intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort, and performance. Computers & Education, 80, 152-161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.08.019

[2] Attila, Y., & Arieli-Attali, M. (2015). Gamification in assessment: Do points affect performance. Computers & Education, 83, 57-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.12.012

[3] Malek, S. L., Sarin, S., & Haon, C. (2020). Extrinsic rewards, intrinsic motivation, and new product development performance. Journal of Product Innovation and Management, 37(6), 528-551. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12554

[4] Alt, D. (2023). Assessing the benefits of gamification in mathematics for student gameful experience and gaming motivation. Computers & Education, 200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104806.

[5] Huang, R., Ritzhaupt, A. D., Sommer, M., Zhu, J., Stephen, A., Valle, N., Hampton, J., & Li, J. (2020). The impact of gamification in educational settings on student learning outcomes: A meta-analysis. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68, 1875-1901. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09807-z

[6] Chapman, J. R., Kohler, T. B., Rick, P. J., & Trego, A. (2023). Maybe we’ve got it wrong. An experimental evaluation of self-determination and Flow Theory in gamification. Journal of Research on Technology in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2023.2242981

[7] Costley, N. N. (2022). Teacher perceptions of gamification in K-8 classrooms. Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2649294937). Retrieved from http://proxy-ln.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/teacher-perceptions-gamification-k-8-classrooms/docview/2649294937/se-2

[8] Thomas, E. A. (2023). The adoption of a learning management system by K-8 school teachers (Order No. 30526749). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global; Publicly Available Content Database. (2833416528). Retrieved from http://proxy-ln.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/adoption-learning-management-system-k-8-school/docview/2833416528/se-2

[9] Van Roy, R., & Zaman, B. (2017). Why gamification fails in education and how to make it successful: Introducing nine gamification heuristics based on self-determination theory. In M. Ma & A. Oikonomou (Eds.), Serious games and edutainment applications (Vol. II, pp. 485–509). Springer.