The Effects of Gamifying Mathematics Lessons at High School Level

This study evaluates "Mathiade," a gamification scenario for a full high school mathematics lesson that combines competition at the group level with cooperation within heterogeneous groups of three or four students. The authors designed the approach to capture the motivational benefits of leaderboards while limiting the stigma that individual rankings can impose on low performers. The work is positioned against a broader debate over whether gamification undermines intrinsic motivation and disadvantages weaker learners, and it aims to offer a realistic view of gamification's benefits in classrooms.

The evaluation was a quasi-experiment with 43 tenth-grade students (average age 17) drawn from four classes at a secondary school. Each student completed a 30-minute fraction arithmetic task of 120 items either through the Mathiade browser app or on paper, with conditions switched across two sessions. Motivation was measured using a 13-item, seven-point questionnaire covering social integration, autonomy, decision-making, and capability. Motivation rose in the gamified condition (mean change of 0.56 versus 0.06 for the control), with the largest difference in social integration, and an ANOVA showed a significant condition effect (p = .032). Task performance was lower overall under gamification (41.89 versus 61.00 correct answers), but the decline between sessions was markedly smaller (22% versus 69%). Gender differences emerged only in the gamified condition, where males outperformed females. Teacher logs recorded far more communicative and collaborative events under gamification, and the performance gap between high and low performers narrowed. The authors acknowledge that the small, single-school sample, the use of task completion as a proxy for effort rather than learning, and the short duration limit the generalizability of these findings.