Have you ever heard of Pavlov’s dog?
In 1902, physiologist Ivan Pavlov conducted a series of experiments that studied how living brains associate certain triggers with certain results, and will respond accordingly. In his most famous experiment, he trained a dog to associate the sound of a bell with the arrival of food. As a result, the dog would start to salivate whenever a bell was rung, even if no food was arriving. Through a process known as conditioning, he was able to train the dog to drool on command.
Or perhaps it was the other way around?
So why do I mention Pavlov in a series about gamification? After his research was published, many other researchers concluded that the same kind of conditioning was key to understanding human behavior. Basically, they realized that if they were able teach a person to react a certain way to a stimulus, they would be able to affect how that person acted, learned, and even thought almost at will.
Nowadays, you can find evidence of conditioning in almost every aspect of life. Positive conditioning is evident in advertising and marketing, in parenting and medical therapy, in sports games, in video games, in education..
Wait a second. Sports games? Video games? Education?
Yep. Many, many games take advantage of conditioning principles to encourage people to play. For example, free-to-play computer games like Farmville will hook people by providing positive results on a scheduled pace; your first few crops will give you money after only five minutes! After a while, those rewards become fewer but larger, requiring players to keep playing and work harder to obtain that next level. In the meantime, that reward is always in sight–it’s something tangible that players feel they can easily reach. It’s an opportunity, and players want it.
Other video games provide this incentive as well. For example, any title where gameplay involves leveling up will attach bonuses to each level, which encourages players to keep aiming for progressively more difficult goals.
I know I get a rush every time I clear a level in Jetpack Joyride. Yessss, free coins!
Even more simply, the existence of points in sports encourages athletes to work harder. When a soccer player’s kick results in a goal, or a basketball player’s half-court shot sinks for three points, the exhilaration on their face is so clear even spectators see it, and they’ll often return to the game with renewed vigor. Now that they’ve gotten one point, the player wants more.
So how can teachers take advantage of this in classroom management?
It’s simple: using certain tools, teachers can re-parse the way they monitor their student’s actions to create possibilities rather than punishments. When students are conditioned to associate positive behavior with recognition, praise, or rewards, they will be more inclined towards acting positively, even in situations where it is difficult!
Many tech tools are already considering this angle when creating classroom management tools, including systems that allow teachers to quantify both good and bad behavior. ClassDojo is an online class management platform that takes advantage of positive conditioning. Teachers creating a classroom can assign their students cute avatars, then dole out positive or negative points based on the student’s behavior in class. While the platform is limited to behavior rather than including assignments in the points process, it’s an excellent start when thinking of how gamification can create a positive attitude in your students. When kids start thinking of the classroom as an opportunity to be great rather than a trap for bad behavior, they’re more likely to respond to the very idea of classroom management more positively.
Did I mention that the avatars are cute? BECAUSE THEY ARE!
Another great web tool that can be used to reward positive behaviors is an web platform known simply as The Great Behavior Game.
You’ve got to love the direct approach.
Using this platform, teachers can create rosters of student for each class, then project that roster all on one page. As the lesson progresses and students display positive behaviors (ex. Raising their hand instead of shouting, helping another student during group work time, etc.) the teacher can tap the student’s name to award a point, which eventually add up into stars. One of the benefits of this one is that unlike ClassDojo, students can be managed in groups, with points from each student going into a group total. This brings in an aspect of competition and collaboration to the mix. You can even harness the power of peer pressure to create new rewards, as students encourage their classmates to get more stars and beat other groups at being the ‘best students’.
There are some recommendations I would like to make, however, before simply starting to use points to award positive behaviors:
- Begin by defining clear standards for your students. Students should know what specific behaviors earn points, how many points each behavior earns, and whether disruptive behavior will lose points. Having a poster in the room with these rules may be handy to help student memory.
- Award points according to your rules consistently! If your students think you’re not following the rules, they won’t think that their positive behavior will necessarily be rewarded, and won’t have any motivation. They may even start seeing you as unfair, or as showing favoritism to students who do get points. Your system could end up backfiring, and causing more problems than it solves.
- Award points in real time. If we refer back to Pavlov again, we find that Pavlov had to start by providing food as soon as he rang the bell. Likewise, students need to have the action and the result happen closely together in order to associate them. Providing positive feedback as soon as the student does something positive will create that association, and give them reason to repeat it.
- In many classes, the vague idea of ‘points’ is not a sufficient incentive. After all, what good are they if they don’t mean anything changes? It’s smarter to consider placing tangible rewards into your system that can be ‘earned’ with points. These rewards should be something that students can use to their own benefit. For example, when using The Great Behavior game, a simple solution would be to award a treat or a homework pass every time a student got enough points to earn a star.
One last tool I’d like to point out that works on this principle is a platform known as Classcraft. We’ll touch on Classcraft a couple more times in more detail throughout this series, but one of the things this RPG*-meets-CMS** does beautifully is turn behavior into real, usable rewards. Students doing well in class can earn new abilities for their avatar such as permission to eat in class, or the ability to check their notes during a quiz. Disruptive behavior, however, results in ‘losing health’ and ‘dying’ (in other words, detention.) These effects are directly programmed into the platform, and can be viewed readily by any teacher or student. You may even find students helping each other stay on track–if only so they don’t lose a valuable member of their gaming team.
“Our mage’s health is down! Somebody, shake his desk so he won’t sleep through class again!”
All these points and others are made very cleanly in a recent comic made by artist Stephen McCranie, which is a fun read and surprisingly insightful. We may be using the same principles as Pavlov, but as he points out, kids are smarter than the average pup.
They’re also really good at figuring out when a game is dumb.
As educators, we need to put a little more work into our rewards than that.
We hope you’ll continue joining us throughout this series on the applications of gamification in the classroom. We’d like to include a special thank-you to Stephen McCranie, who was gracious enough to allow us to refer to his work. As we go through the parts of the series listed below, please provide your own ideas and experiences with games and gamification in the comments. After all, education is a community, and communities communicate!
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Pavlov and Classroom Management
Part 3: Rethinking the Grading Process
Part 4: Class Systems in the Classroom
Part 5: Games and Curriculum
Part 6: Conclusion and Resource List
*RPG= Role Playing Game
**CMS=Classroom Management System
