How Different Personalities Benefit From Gamification

Several studies indicate the benefit of mapping gamification elements to personality. However, this mapping requires a strong understanding of the relationship between gamification elements and personality. The existing research that has tried to address this relationship is based on a self-report questionnaire that is obtained from only those learners who complete the entire study. Unfortunately, a bias may result from first forcing learners to complete an entire study and then ignoring learners who drop out in the middle of a study. To overcome this bias, we use a more objective approach to understand the relationship between personality and gamification. In our study, we use the dropout rate as a proxy for learner motivation. We hypothesize that learners who are more motivated by gamification elements will use the gamified website longer. Furthermore, because we use a different method than previous studies used, we analyse our data differently. Our solution is to use survival analysis to analyse our data, which confirms the benefit of using gamification to enhance learner motivation. Our results point to the relationship between the response of different personalities and gamification elements. In further studies, we recommend to use this same approach but with more gamification elements. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS Gamification plays an important role in enhancing learners' motivation and engagement. Different personalities respond differently to gamification elements. The dropout rate can be used to measure learners' motivation. Enhancing the motivation of learners does not necessarily improve their learning.