Gamification has drawn the attention of academics, researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals. Gamification has a diverse meaning that offers to underpin theoretical foundations and knowledge that applied to many disciplines. To provide effective developmental education to assist with retention, it is crucial for industry or institutions to implement best practices that have been proven effective based on strong theoretical foundations. This chapter discusses several critical theoretical areas associated with gamification and how it can be applied to assist with retention. This chapter presents research on both the interest of the student and institutional perspectives for future research.
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A simple definition of learning, as posed by Lachman, is “Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior brought about by practice or experience. However, (a) learning as a process should be identified and distinguished from the behavioral results or the products of that process; (b) learning does not necessarily produce a change in behavior—the behavior may remain relatively unchanged while there is a change in the effectiveness of the stimuli eliciting it; (c) ambiguous words, such as practice and experience, are replaced by words that more clearly represent what happens during learning. The following is suggested as an improved definition: Learning is the process by which a relatively stable modification in stimulus-response relations is developed as a consequence of functional environmental interaction via the senses” (Lachman, 1997). As Bransford et al. (1999) point out, learning can be seen as goal-oriented and directed towards actively seeking new information and knowledge. The learners come into formal education “with a range of prior knowledge, skills, beliefs, and concepts that significantly influence what they notice about the environment and how they organize and interpret it. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, solve problems, and acquire new knowledge” (Bransford et al. 1999, p21). Learning refers to the orientation of problem-solving, decision making, and using embedded real-life tasks and activities to enable the learner to think, communicate, and build upon prior knowledge and experience. Learning takes place concerning content and context; you learn something somewhere (Wenger, 2000; Edelson, 2001; Sharples et al. 2010). Without teaching, the learner would not have the opportunity to develop a firm conceptual base for the content of coherent knowledge structures (Bereiter et al. 1989; Grabinger et al. 1995; Bransford et al. 1999). Building on this base, the learner will develop effective ways of synthesizing, processing, and transforming knowledge.