Gamification means using game design elements in settings that are not games. The meta-analyses find positive effects on learning: small ones on cognitive, motivational and behavioural outcomes in Sailer and Homner (2020), and a medium effect on academic performance in Bai, Hew and Huang (2020), who also note that the evidence is mixed and the idea controversial. The most-cited primary study is Hanus and Fox (2015), a longitudinal classroom study of intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort and academic performance. Read it alongside the meta-analyses.
How the literature is organised
The earliest titles on gamification in education in OpenAlex date from 2009, and there were about 220 in 2015. The first wave consisted of design frameworks and single-course experiments: Simões, Redondo and Vilas (2013) proposed a social gamification framework for a primary-school platform, de-Marcos et al. (2014) compared gamification with social networking in an e-learning course, and Su and Cheng (2015) tested a mobile gamified system for science learning. Hanus and Fox (2015) stands out as a longitudinal study that measured intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort and academic performance.
By 2019 there were enough experiments for synthesis. Sailer and Homner (2020) meta-analysed effects on cognitive, motivational and behavioural learning outcomes. Zainuddin et al. (2020) systematically reviewed the empirical evidence, and Bai, Hew and Huang (2020) combined a meta-analysis with a synthesis of qualitative data.
Main debates
Two questions dominate. The first is what gamification does to motivation, which Hanus and Fox (2015) examined over time and Buckley and Doyle (2016) examined by relating students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to their participation and performance in a gamified intervention. The second is theoretical: Krath et al. (2021) reviewed the theoretical foundations used in research on gamification, serious games and game-based learning because an overview of the psychological mechanisms was lacking.
Where recent work is heading
The current direction is tailoring. Studies examine how personality and player type change the response to game elements (Smiderle et al., 2020; Oliveira et al., 2022), and Zourmpakis, Kalogiannakis and Papadakis (2023) test adaptive gamification in science education. Subject-specific reviews now cover science, health professions and language learning. There are also creative applications with a clear purpose, such as the Cranky Uncle game for building resilience to climate misinformation (Cook et al., 2023).
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Rodrigo Smiderle and 4 others (2020). Smart Learning Environments.
Cited by 492Open accessdoi:10.1186/s40561-019-0098-x
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Cited by 118Open accessdoi:10.3390/computers12070143
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Cited by 395Open accessdoi:10.1186/s40561-023-00227-z
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 8,897 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2009 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2009
2
2011
8
2012
17
2013
63
2014
119
2015
219
2016
251
2017
293
2018
378
2019
475
2020
568
2021
656
2022
652
2023
897
2024
1,176
2025
1,612
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 166 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Computers & Education10 papers
Education and Information Technologies8 papers
Education Sciences7 papers
Computers in Human Behavior6 papers
Interactive Learning Environments6 papers
Smart Learning Environments6 papers
International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET)5 papers
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health4 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Effects on learning and motivation
(gamif*) AND (education OR learning OR student* OR classroom) AND (motivation OR engagement OR achievement OR "learning outcome*")
Distinguish from game-based learning
(gamif*) NOT ("serious game*" OR "game-based learning" OR "video game*") AND (education OR student*)
Higher education, specific elements
(gamif*) AND (badge* OR leaderboard* OR points) AND ("higher education" OR universit* OR undergraduate*)
Explore gamification in education in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Theory behind gamification
Krath et al. (2021) reviewed which theories gamification research actually uses.
Personalised and adaptive gamification
Smiderle et al. (2020) on personality; Oliveira et al. (2022) on personalised designs.
Health professions education
Gentry et al. (2019) and van Gaalen et al. (2021) are the main systematic reviews.
Science education
Kalogiannakis, Papadakis and Zourmpakis (2021) review gamification in science teaching.
Where gamification is added to online or flipped formats to keep students working.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Assessing the effects of gamification in the classroom: A longitudinal study on intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort, and academic performance” (2015), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Hanus, M. D., & Fox, J. (2015). Assessing the effects of gamification in the classroom: A longitudinal study on intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort, and academic performance. Computers & Education, 80, 152–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.08.019
MLA 9th edition
Hanus, Michael D., and Jesse Fox. “Assessing the Effects of Gamification in the Classroom: A Longitudinal Study on Intrinsic Motivation, Social Comparison, Satisfaction, Effort, and Academic Performance.” Computers & Education, vol. 80, 2015, pp. 152–61, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.08.019.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between gamification and game-based learning?
Gamification adds game elements to an activity that is not a game, such as awarding badges for completed homework. Game-based learning and serious games use an actual game as the learning activity. The literatures overlap but their evidence is different, so decide which you are reviewing and exclude the other in your search.
Does gamification work?
On average the meta-analyses find a positive effect. Sailer and Homner (2020) report small effects on cognitive (g = .49), motivational (g = .36) and behavioural (g = .25) learning outcomes. Bai, Hew and Huang (2020), pooling 30 interventions with 3,202 participants, report a medium effect on academic performance (g = 0.504). Averages hide variation: Luo (2022) reviews the factors behind varied effectiveness, and Hanus and Fox (2015) is the longitudinal classroom study to read for what can happen over a whole course.
Where do I find the general definition of gamification?
Works that define gamification in general do not contain education terms in their titles, so they are not in the list on this page. Buckley and Doyle (2016) map the central concepts required for a learning intervention to count as gamified; follow their references, and those of Sailer and Homner (2020), to the general definitions and cite the original.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches (gamification AND (education OR educational OR learning OR students OR classroom)). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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