The Role of Gamification in Learning Transfer: Does Early Skill Learning Predict Performance in Complex Tasks?

This study examines whether gamification enhances learning transfer in a physics-based educational game, and whether the efficiency of early skill acquisition predicts later performance on more complex tasks. Across two closely related samples of secondary students and participants totaling roughly 180 individuals, gamified and standard training conditions produced no significant differences in efficiency, points earned, or conceptual quiz gains. The central finding is instead that early foundational efficiency, measured across the first four levels of the game, reliably predicted performance on later complex tasks, explaining about ten percent of the variance in composite transfer outcomes.

The strongest predictive effects appeared at Levels 5 and 7, with early skill acquisition accounting for significant portions of performance on these advanced challenges. Gamification did not moderate transfer overall, though a single significant interaction at Level 7 suggested that gamified learners transferred more strongly under the more demanding cognitive conditions of that level. Taken together, these results indicate that gamification is not uniformly beneficial and that its effects may depend on the cognitive demands a learner faces.

The authors conclude that the quality and strategic variety of early practice matter more than mere exposure to the material, and that gamification should be applied adaptively, targeting situations where novel cognitive demands make its motivational or structural supports most useful, rather than deployed uniformly across all learning contexts. The research is situated within secondary-level education and a single physics-based game environment, so its generalizability to other age groups, subject domains, and game designs remains an open question.