Evaluate how your inquiry impacts on future inquiry/practice

Week 31: Evaluate how your Inquiry impacts on future Inquiry/practice

My inquiry question: "To what extent does gamification increase motivation, engagement and student achievement?"

Anticipated Impact One:  Students will become more engaged and motivated with learning.
From the time I introduced gamification into the classroom up until now, there has been are remarkable shift in motivation and engagement.  Classcraft has made the learning more fun for the students and has closed the gap between my priority students and the rest of the class with their learning attitudes.   They are now more willing to give things a go where as before they often gave up.  With a points system and all students belonging to a team, everyone is more engaged to gain more points and benefits for their team through each learning task.  From the evidence I gathered at the start, I knew that children would be excited to see some sort of gamification, however I was a little sceptical about its actual impact.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the actual impact to be very positive for my learners.

Stoll and Temperely, (2015), state that one of the biggest pressing issues facing schools today is narrowing the gaps.  Through the implementation of gamification  I have addressed this issue with all students engaged and motivated.  

Anticipated Impact Two: Students will collaborate more in the classroom.
Another one of my anticipated impacts was that students would collaborate more.  Classcraft did in fact bring the students together on a daily basis.  With the teams now established, children used their strengths and weaknesses of the game to try and level up.  They had to rely on each other more as they shared different powers which all needed to be used in order to collect vital health and gold pieces.  Children were now helping eachother complete the quests (leaning tasks).  From my observations, this actual impact was very rewarding to witness.  My more able students were now helping my less able students with completing their tasks.  An unexpected impact was how much they got involved with the game.  When one of my students lost some health, straight away one of their team members offered to transfer some of their health in order for the team to level up.  A big shift in empathy took place in the classroom as they often got together with their devices to talk about each of their avatars and where they were positioned in the game.

Anticipated Impact Three:  Children might become too competitive causing pressure and anxiety.
This was one area which I was potentially going to have to address.  Children were grouped into five teams.  I anticipated that there would be a high level of competitiveness within the class as each day they would be able to see the leaderboard.  The actual impact was fairly minor.  Children were more focused on their team and trying to level up than really focusing on the other teams.  My priority students did come under some pressure to complete their tasks, but due to the collaboration factor, they started to  accept other members of their team helping them along to finish.  

What is the impact on future inquiry/practice?
The use of this inquiry cycle has been an exciting journey to follow and complete.  Halbert, Kaser, & Keohn (2011), argue that it is never easy for an experienced teacher to change their teaching repertoire.  I agree with this statement as I would never have implemented gamification in my classroom, due to the fact that I thought it was simply playing games!  Through this inquiry structure, it has allowed me to dig deeper into my teaching pedagogy and realise that with sound research and a growth mindset, gamification brought my class closer together with more engagement and motivation.  
 If I was to repeat the process, I would invite my colleagues to work alongside me, trying different game based learning, to investigate which games would be more effective.  In that way we could have some challenging conversations that would test our pedagogies.

(Words 657)

References:

Halbert, J., Kaser, L., & Koehn, D. (2011). Spirals of Inquiry: Building Professional Inquiry to Foster Student Learning. Paper presented at 24th International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement. Limassol, Cyprus. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U1JA3_sx_eN5IXNtyDED1dwtlG4l7cA2/view?usp=sharing

Stoll, L., and Temperley, J. (2015). Narrowing the Gap with Spirals of Enquiry: Evaluation of Whole Education’s Pilot. Whole Education, UK. Retrieved from http://thesendhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/narrowing-the-gap-with-spirals-of-enquiry.pdf