School should be a place of exploration and discovery — a place of opportunity and promise. For students with learning difficulties, however, life in the classroom is anything but hopeful and exciting.
Indeed, children with learning challenges often find themselves marginalized, misjudged, and demoralized. As a result, they are at increased risk not only for poor performance and low education attainment, but also for behavioral and mental health issues.
Fortunately, though, there is hope, and it comes from an unlikely place. Parents, educators, and child healthcare providers are increasingly recognizing the benefits of gamification for all students and, in particular, for students with learning difficulties.
The Process of Gamification and Its Introduction to the Classroom
As the name suggests, gamification in education refers simply to the use of games for pedagogical purposes. Gamification in the classroom can take many forms, from variations on traditional board games to computer-based games to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) gaming.
What links the various modes of academic gamification, however, is the premise that children learn best through play. The benefits of gamification for children with learning difficulties, such as those with sensory processing issues, dyslexia, or attentional disorders, appear to be especially significant.
For children with these conditions, traditional education based largely on the passive reception of teacher instruction followed by high-stakes assessments can quickly become associated with failure, judgment, ridicule, and, ultimately, anxiety and depression. Children may begin to perceive themselves to be unintelligent, incompetent, or simply lazy.
This misperception may even be shared and reinforced by teachers and peers, but it is based principally on the wide-scale misunderstanding of what learning difficulties are, how prevalent they are, and how they manifest in a child’s classroom performance.
How Gamification Helps Students with Learning Difficulties
Gamification enables children with learning challenges to learn in alternative ways — ways more conducive to their individual learning needs and styles — and to demonstrate mastery of their lessons through these non-traditional means.
For instance, a child with dyslexia may engage in a virtual reality game to demonstrate their mastery of advanced scientific and technological concepts. Whereas, they may not have been able to achieve that same mastery by learning principles through written text.
The result is often not only a significant improvement in academic performance but also the child’s social, emotional, and mental well-being. The child’s achievements in the game space increase self-confidence and self-esteem while also enabling peers and educators to more readily appreciate the unique skills, talents, and bits of intelligence the child possesses. In other words, the student, their peers, and their teachers learn to better distinguish the child from their particular learning challenges.
Introducing Gamification in Learning Outside of the Classroom
As promising as gamification is in the school setting, the classroom is far from the only arena where games can prove to be an invaluable learning tool. Whether a student is in primary school and endeavoring to master mathematics fundamentals or they’re a University student preparing for a tough biology exam, gamification can be a super resource.
For students, parents, and educators alike, however, the key to using gamification for learning is to have a clear sense of purpose in mind. Students using games to prepare for a final exam, for instance, may approach each play session as a rehearsal for confronting the “big boss” — the exam itself.
Each session may, in other words, serve as a rehearsal for exam day as well as a method of progressing systematically from one level of content mastery to another until, at last, the knowledge required for the exam has been fully internalized.
How Gamification Increases Students’ Chance of Success
As suggested above, gamification provides tremendous benefits for students both with and without learning difficulties. These benefits, moreover, span multiple domains. Students are more likely to improve their academic performance by engaging in learning processes that suit their individual learning needs and styles.
In addition, students, particularly those with learning difficulties, are also more likely to feel more confident and more competent throughout the educational process, especially if they’re struggling with online learning.
Above all, gamification can help students with learning difficulties overcome one of the most significant barriers to academic success: loss of motivation. Playing games they enjoy and excel at can keep students engaged and optimistic when traditional learning methods leave them feeling disgruntled, dejected, and hopeless.
The Takeaway
Gamification is gaining recognition among educators, parents, and students as an invaluable learning tool. Virtual reality and computer-based games, for instance, can provide customized learning experiences, enabling students to explore highly sophisticated content in fun, engaging, and non-intimidating ways. For students with learning difficulties, games can provide a highly effective medium for personalizing the learning process, demonstrating content mastering, and rediscovering their motivation and excitement in the learning process. The end result is higher self-esteem, improved self-confidence, enhanced academic performance, and a reduced risk of behavioral challenges, depression, and anxiety.
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