As I prep for my final year as a university lecturer, I’m researching the effectiveness of gamification as a pedagogical strategy for enhancing cognitive skills development. I’m thinking about asking six students to carve a space for an Air Tag into their hard cover Media Writing Journals and to permit their colleagues to watch on an electronic map where they’re creating content.
In recent years, gamification has emerged as a promising approach to engage students and promote active learning experiences. However, its impact on cognitive skill development, especially in specialized academic domains, remains relatively underexplored. So I’m looking at research that has assessed the influence of gamified learning interventions on students' cognitive abilities, especially on their critical thinking as they unpack prompts for 10 topics I’ve set for their consideration.
I hope to collect data through pre- and post-intervention assessments, student surveys, and qualitative feedback sessions. If my little experiment works out, I think I will be able to show improvements in cognitive skills among participants exposed to gamified learning experiences compared to those in traditional instructional settings.
There’s a Games Fleadh every March on our sister campus in County Tipperary. I hope to have my findings in place so I can show that gamification of writing tasks can foster cognitive skill development in higher education contexts, particularly for creative media students who would prefer to sketch or render frames for animated shorts. I’ve started by scavenging a growing body of research on gamification in education and that has resulted in me being nominated to review a research paper. So I’m doing that now, hoping to gain valuable insights into how I can enhance learning outcomes in the field of creative multimodal media. I sincerely believe gamified writing session can help me improve my delivery of course content in higher education settings.
Notes to self: methodological rigour, originality, interest to readers, wider significance.