Um estudo comparativo entre gamificação e ensino tradicional: escolhas e narrativa enquanto mecânicas de jogo.e seus efeitos sobre o engajamento e desempenho de alunos de graduação em aula remota

Abstract

Formal education is a process which requires programming of teaching conditions that properly help the achievement of educational objectives. For some authors, student’s engagement levels to the school environment are related to the achievement of those goals, as it works to predict many factors, such as academic performance and quality of interpersonal relationships. Among the strategies used to favor school engagement, gamification has stood out stands out in the literature. It refers to the adaptation of elements commonly present in games to situations that are not naturally a game, such as a classroom, as a way to make students achieve similar engagement levels to those found on people who play games. This paper stablishes a comparison between the exclusive use of traditional teaching strategies and the use of some elements of gamification, based on narrative, to verify engagement levels of undergraduate students in a classroom environment of remote class, in the duration of three classes for each group. To achieve this, a between-groups experimental design was chosen to detect variations on the participants’ engagement levels across experimental conditions, and test performance. The measurement of these levels was made using the Escala de Engajamento Escolar, a validated instrument designed to evaluate school engagement, as well as observation and registering of engagement related behaviors, with the assistance of video recording and from tests about the contents taught in each class. In total, 29 undergraduate students, of different higher education institutions across the metropolitan region of Belém, Pará, participated on the experiment. Comparatively, the gamified classes group presented higher levels of engagement in the first two classes and a significant drop in the last one. In conclusion, it’s possible that the game elements applied in this experiment are not sufficient to keep stable levels of engagement for longer periods, making it necessary to evaluate the stability of these levels when assisted by the use of other game elements in further researches.