Tailoring gamified educational systems to users and context

• Ano de defesa: 2022
• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Luiz Antonio Lima
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Aprendizado; Educação; Education; Gamificação; Gamification; Learning; Personalização; Personalization; Persuasão; Persuasion
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/55/55134/tde-13022023-172407/

Gamification refers to adding game elements to contexts other than games. As its success is assumed to depend on many moderators (e.g., user characteristics) and the gamification design itself, research has investigated how to tailor gamification to users to improve its effectiveness; that is, personalized gamification. However, personalization approaches i) are predominantly focused on user data, whereas contextual factors (e.g., task to be done and geographic location) also are important for gamification success; ii) often do not take into account multiple factors simultaneously, neither their interactions, which is necessary given that many of those are relevant moderators; iii) have not been properly validated, consequently, whether they improve one-size-fits-all gamification (i.e., no tailoring) remains unknown. That is, there is no empirically validated approach for personalizing gamification designs to the users and contexts characteristics within the educational domain. To address this problem, this research aims to develop and validate a personalization approach for tailoring gamification designs of educational systems to contextual and user characteristics. Three main steps were devised to achieve that goal: i) studying moderators of gamifications success to understand factors to be considered in the tailoring process; ii) creating an approach that simultaneously considers multiple contextual and user characteristics to tailor educational systems gamification designs; and iii) empirically validating our approach compared to one-size-fits-all gamification. Based on 10 studies, this research contributes i) empirical evidence suggesting contextual and user characteristics that moderate gamifications success, ii) two recommender systems that guide on the multidimensional personalization of gamification, and iii) empirical evidence on how personalized gamification compares to the one-size-fits-all approach in terms of student motivation. Thus, this research informs the design of gamified educational systems, presenting empirical evidence on which information to consider, recommendations on how to personalize them to multiple characteristics simultaneously, and evidence on how such personalization contributes to gamification applied to education.