摘要：“Gamified” active learning has been shown to increase students’ academic performance and engagement and help them make more social connections than standard course settings. However, the costs to use an educational game design with efficient delivery of the game/course plan can be problematic. Our first objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of gamification by using existing techniques (e.g., simple HTML-based games) and readily available collaborative tools (e.g., wikis) from a typical learning management system (LMS), such as Blackboard. Our second objective was to examine students’ attitudes toward gamification (e.g., perceived usefulness). An online survey was given to 80 graduate students who took an entry-level biostatistics course from 2015 to 2017 at a midwestern university in the United States. Our study was conducted using an experimental group (class with implementation of gamification) and control group (class without implementation of gamified activities) that were randomly selected from graduate-level statistics courses. A Welch’s independent t-test revealed a significant difference (p < .001) in the mean exam scores of the experimental and control groups. The difference favored classes with gamification. The findings suggest that using built-in LMS tools to design gamified learning activities can enhance students’ academic performance and the competencies gained, as well as provide more diversified learning methods and motivation, and offer easy modifications for different learning needs.
