Math Teacher Perceptions About Gamification Strategies: An Exploratory Study in the Spanish Context

Introduction

In April 1962, Neville V. Scarfe, dean of the Faculty and College of Education of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) at that time, pronounced these words in his talk at the 1962 ACEI Study Conference in Indianapolis (IN, USA):

Since then, the relevance of play, games and game-based teaching and learning (either serious games or gamification) in the scientific literature has grown as a result of the increasing interest in their influence on learners’ achievement and motivation (Greipl et al., 2020; Karagiorgas & Niemann, 2017; Sangkyun et al., 2018). In this line, several studies have been conducted about the effectiveness of these techniques in different areas, such as business (Lin et al., 2018), statistics (Boyle et al., 2014), natural sciences (Mallitasig-Sangucho & Freire-Aillón, 2020), physical education (Sebastiani-Obrador & Campus-Rius, 2019), and social sciences (Ortega-Sánchez & Gómez-Trigueros, 2019). Nevertheless, scholars such as Qian and Clark (2016) and Jabbar and Felicia (2015) have highlighted that, despite the numerous reviews on its potential, there is no consensus as to what extent the effect of game-based learning is positive.

It seems beyond question, however, that games are linked to effects on students’ motivation and affect (Koivisto & Hamari, 2019; Ruiz-Bañuls et al., 2021), but there is still debate on whether such effects benefit learning. Likewise, several studies have pointed how games can help academic achievement in different areas of the curriculum (Connolly et al., 2012; Fithriani, 2021; Young et al., 2012), but these results are still ambiguous (Sailer & Homner, 2020). This has led experts to conclude that the use of games as such in the classroom does not entail effective learning but rather that “specific game design elements have specific psychological effects” (Sailer et al., 2017, p. 371) only if they are well designed and based on well-established theoretical knowledge (Werbach, 2014).

As in other areas of knowledge and school subjects, game-based strategies have been used in the teaching of mathematics, both in the form of videogames and more traditional play. Accordingly, research has tried to examine their benefits for learning, revealing an impact on students’ knowledge comprehension and motivation towards the subject (Tokac et al., 2019), number knowledge (Brezovszky et al., 2019), mathematics fluency (Brezovszky et al., 2015) and general mathematics achievement (Wang et al., 2018). In line with the potential of gamification for the acquisition of mathematical knowledge and skills, it has been also demonstrated that the area of mathematics allows the development of students’ competences and the integration of multiple educational techniques (Caballero-Carrasco, 2020; Palacios-Hidalgo & Cimas, 2020, 2021). Furthermore, some scholars have analyzed teachers’ perceptions of the value of games and videogames in science subjects (Pektaş & Kepceoğlu, 2019) and from a general perspective (Bourgonjon et al., 2013; Opriș et al., 2021), as well as students’ thoughts about certain aspects of their use in the primary mathematics class (Sun et al., 2021). However, up to the researcher’s knowledge there are no studies examining the opinions of math teachers (either pre-service or in-service) in compulsory education about the use of these strategies for learning contents and acquiring skills related to the subject, neither are there research instruments that can be used for such a purpose. Therefore, this study aims to design and validate an instrument that helps to analyze the perceptions of math teachers regarding the use and pertinence of gamification strategies in their teaching.