Adapting Gamification Elements to Learners’ Personality dimensions

Abstract

Gamification, adding game elements to non-game contexts, has been shown to improve users’ motivation, engagement and satisfaction in different disciplines, including health and education. However, existing research has pointed out that users’ attributes, such as personality and mood, can influence its effectiveness. This thesis therefore proposes a model that can be used to adapt gamification elements. One stable user attribute that can be employed as the basis for such adaptation is personality. The first step in building the model is to understand how personality dimensions interact with gamification elements in the online learning environment. We ran three experimental studies, each using the same approach and different gamification elements. In each study, we measured learners’ motivation, knowledge gain and satisfaction. The results from these studies and those available in the literature were used to establish rules for building an adaptive model, which was shown to be beneficial to learners in a further study that was carried out to evaluate it. The proposed adaptive model can be used as a starting point to build a dynamic adaptive model that will ensure that users have the best experience in any gamified system.