On the effectiveness of game-like and social approaches in learning: Comparing educational gaming, gamification & social networking

Game-like approaches are becoming increasingly popular in education, with educational games and gamification drawing increasing levels of attention. While games specifically designed for educational purposes have been used for decades, gamification is particularly new and contrasting evidence was presented about its effectiveness. The potential of social networks has also been harnessed by educators and institutions either using popular social networking sites or specific educational instances. This paper studies how well-established approaches (educational game and social networking) compare with more novel ones (gamification and social gamification) in terms of learning performance in an undergraduate course. Four experimental conditions were compared in an experiment (N = 379). Results suggest that all experimental conditions significantly impact on learning performance, but social gamification returned better results in terms of immediacy and for all types of assessments.