Development and implementation of a gamified student information system for K-12 schools

Advances in technology have brought education to a whole new level. With the ease of access to various technological devices and the Internet, schools have become places so different from what they were just a short time ago. Today a big majority of schools provide their stakeholders with online learning opportunities in addition to traditional school practices. On the other hand, motivation has always been an issue in education, but most probably it has never been as challenging as it is today. A large body of research suggest that the number of students who have trouble with homework completion is significantly higher in upper grades in K-12 schools. Therefore, motivating secondary and high school students towards homework should be prioritised in educational institutions. One way of doing this economically could be the exploitation of readily available online technology tools such as student information systems. Educational technologies have been around for a long time. However, to what extent they foster motivation and create positive emotions in students and as a result generate more retention rates is not widely studied. Gamification, use of game elements in nongame contexts, is a promising method which has recently emerged and widely used in various online platforms including e-learning environments. However, it has never been applied in a student information system in the literature. In this study, a student information system (SIS) was enriched with gamification methodology and then implemented with a sample of 172 secondary school and high school students in order to explore whether a gamified student information system (GSIS) would make a significant difference on their overall homework motivation, emotions towards and retention rates on the student information systems. The development period of the GSIS lasted 6 months, and then the implementation period began, which lasted a whole semester (12 weeks). For data collection, Homework Motivation Scale, Emotion Words Prompt List, student information system's tracking logs, GSIS Questionnaire, field notes, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews were used. The data from Homework Motivation Scale, Emotion Words Prompt List and student information system's tracking logs were analysed in SPSS 20 for statistical significance, the data gathered from the GSIS Questionnaire were analysed with descriptive statistics and the data from field notes, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews were processed with content analysis method. The findings of the present study show that the GSIS does not make a significant difference in secondary school and high school students' overall homework motivation, emotions towards and their retention rates in student information systems. The obtained result is found to be largely associated with two major factors: The way gamification elements were employed in the GSIS and the context related constraints experienced during the implementation period. On the other hand, it is found out that high school and secondary school students' emotions towards the GSIS are mostly positive, and that they use the GSIS more frequently than those who use the non-gamified SIS. Furthermore, high school and secondary school students' views on the gamified student information system as a whole, gamification and the specific gamification elements utilised were examined, and noteworthy results were obtained regarding the implementation of gamification within the context of a student information system. The present study is significant in the sense that, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first study in literature which employs gamification in the context of an SIS for K-12 schools and might provide insights for the future design of SISs with a special emphasis on the use of gamification on such platforms.