Gamified metacognitive prompts in a higher education flipped classroom

Flipped classroom teaching approaches have increased in popularity in recent years. A common problem in these models is that students do not prepare properly for class. This study seeks to address this problem from the perspective of metacognitive reflection in order to equip students to be more capable of managing their own learning. A custom website was developed for use in a university-level flipped classroom. It provided students with access to their course content and also included three versions of metacognitive prompts, two of which included gamification. One version used structured gamification and the other made use of an open-ended gamification design. A between-subjects experiment was conducted across two undergraduate courses (n=58) over five weeks. The results showed no change in metacognitive awareness for the student group as a whole. However, the open-ended gamification group showed a significant difference compared to the guided gamification group. Furthermore, the structured gamification group showed a decrease in their regulation of cognition skills. This highlights the potential for bottom-up, open-ended gamification designs to be effective in educational situations where reflection is important. The article concludes with a discussion of the context-specific nature of gamification, as the potential gamification design implications based on these results.