Personalised gamification enhances student participation but produces mixed effects on emotional and cognitive engagements: a systematic review

In recent years, many studies have highlighted the need to go beyond the “one-size-fits-all” gamification approach to tailored or personalised gamification to optimise students’ engagement based on their user attributes. However, little is known about its effectiveness on student engagement. To advance the understanding of personalized gamification in educational contexts, we conducted a comprehensive systematic review and identified 31 empirical studies from eight major educational databases. The present study offers two new contributions to the literature. First, it presents a scheme for classifying the various user attributes into five main archetypes – Challenger, Competitor, Team Player, Explorer, and Autonomy Seeker – thus providing a parsimonious way to conceptually organise the different key user attributes reported in the literature. Second, for the first time, it examines the effects of personalised gamification on students’ behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement. Although the effect of personalised gamification in increasing students’ behavioural engagement (student participation) was positive, mixed effects on students’ cognitive and emotional engagement were found. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges of personalised gamification and future research directions.