Gamified Digital Tools Shape Perceived Learning in Online Teacher Training

A sweeping new study from Spain has found that embedding escape-room puzzles, interactive quizzes, and game-based activities into online teacher training significantly boosts preservice teachers’ motivation, their sense of pedagogical usefulness of digital tools, and—most strikingly—their perceptions of autonomy and formative feedback. The research, published in Discover Education, offers one of the most methodologically rigorous examinations to date of how gamified digital platforms shape the learning experience of university students training to teach in fully distance-education programs.

The study was conducted by a team at Atlántico Medio University in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, led by Rachid Berd-Gómez, together with Elena Carrión-Candel, Camilo Goelkel Medina, Raquel Rubio González, and Ana María González-Martín. Their goal was twofold: to build and validate a new questionnaire capable of measuring student perceptions of gamification and digital technologies, and then to deploy that instrument to assess whether a semester-long gamified intervention actually changed how future teachers experienced their online coursework.

The research team designed a teaching innovation for students enrolled in online Early Childhood Education and Primary Education degree programs. Over an academic semester, students engaged in three one-hour synchronous practical sessions built around four popular gamified platforms: Genially, Educaplay, Wayground, and WordWall. Each session was followed by a collaborative review with the subject teacher—covering Music, Geography, or Language and Literature—in which the group critically examined the questions students found most difficult, turning the games into structured opportunities for pedagogical reflection rather than isolated entertainment.

The activities themselves were ambitious in scope. The most popular resource, chosen by 46 percent of participants, was a Genially-Breakout experience called “Mapamundi Breakout,” in which students embarked on a five-mission educational journey across the continents, solving sets of three questions per challenge to assemble the digits of a final unlock code. A companion Genially activity, the “Spanish Language Protocol,” wove phonetics, grammar, and literary history into a narrative of puzzles and anagrams. Educaplay, the second most valued tool at 27 percent, hosted a phoneme-matching game on the Spanish consonant system and a timed matching quiz on the pioneers of geography. Wayground, at 16 percent, delivered “The Concert: The Instruments of the Orchestra,” a fast-paced mobile quiz rewarding speed and accuracy on instrument families and musical language. WordWall, selected by 7 percent, rounded out the suite with geography and children’s literature quizzes. All materials were developed by the faculty members responsible for each subject to ensure alignment with curricular objectives.

Crucially, the researchers did not simply assume their questionnaire worked. They developed a new instrument, GAMIF_TICS, built on twenty Likert-type items organized into three theoretically grounded dimensions: interest, initial motivation, and activation; pedagogical usefulness and active learning; and formative assessment, feedback, and autonomy. The design drew on established instruments including the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, the EGAMEDU scale, and the ACUTIC questionnaire. A panel of eight experts in educational psychology, educational technology, and instrument design reviewed every item, yielding content validity index values ranging from 0.875 to 1.000—well above accepted thresholds.

The statistical machinery behind the study was correspondingly robust. With 515 valid pre-intervention responses and a final paired sample of 455 participants who completed both measurements, the team first ran an exploratory factor analysis using a weighted least squares mean- and variance-adjusted estimator on a polychoric correlation matrix, treating the ordinal Likert items as ordered categorical indicators. Although the scree plot did not unambiguously favor a three-factor solution, the three-factor model was the first to satisfy all prespecified fit criteria—CFI and TLI above 0.95, RMSEA below 0.06, and SRMR below 0.08—while remaining theoretically interpretable and parsimonious. Confirmatory factor analyses conducted separately for the pre- and post-intervention phases confirmed the three-dimensional structure at both occasions, with the post-intervention model achieving an excellent fit: CFI of 0.991 and RMSEA of 0.056. Internal consistency coefficients—both Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega—exceeded 0.80 for every dimension, with most surpassing 0.90.

Perhaps the study’s most important psychometric achievement was demonstrating full longitudinal scalar invariance. In plain terms, the researchers showed that the factor structure, factor loadings, and item thresholds remained statistically equivalent before and after the intervention: a non-significant WLSMV chi-square difference test (Δχ²(72) = 73.683, p = .423) and negligible changes in approximate fit indices confirmed that students interpreted the questionnaire items in essentially the same way at both time points. This matters enormously for pre-post studies, because it rules out the possibility that apparent improvements are artifacts of the instrument functioning differently after the intervention. The observed changes, in other words, occurred on a common measurement scale.

When the team compared pre- and post-intervention scores using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test—an appropriate choice given that normality tests showed the data departed significantly from normal distributions—the results were striking. Every item and dimension improved significantly (p < .001) with a single exception: an item asking whether instructors had used digital games as an effective tool to enhance learning, which just missed significance at p = .051. At the dimension level, effect sizes were moderate to large: r = .41 for interest and activation, r = .38 for pedagogical usefulness and active learning, and r = .45 for formative assessment, feedback, and autonomy—the strongest effect of all. The paired sample was predominantly female (89 percent) and enrolled in Primary Education (84 percent), with a mean age of 29.19 years. Correlation and subgroup analyses revealed remarkably uniform improvements across age, gender, and degree program, with only marginal exceptions such as item six, concerning motivation through competition, where women and Early Childhood Education students reported slightly greater gains.

The quantitative findings were reinforced by open-ended responses. Roughly 75 percent of students described the overall experience as motivating, enjoyable, and enriching, while about 18 percent held mixed views—acknowledging the tools’ usefulness while noting technical or adaptation challenges—and only 7 percent reported predominantly negative experiences. Thematic analysis surfaced five recurring themes: increased motivation, active participation, meaningful learning, technological difficulties, and a sense of overload. More than 80 percent of respondents to a second question identified clear advantages over traditional methods, citing heightened motivation, active learning through interactivity and immediate feedback, and improved content retention.

The authors frame their findings through two theoretical lenses. According to the Theory of Gamified Learning, gamification does not influence learning outcomes directly; rather, game attributes modify learning-relevant behaviors such as attention, persistence, and time on task, meaning that instructional design quality remains fundamental. In this intervention, the platforms were not deployed as isolated reward systems but woven into curriculum-aligned activities requiring students to answer questions, solve progressively structured challenges, receive immediate feedback, and participate in collaborative review. Meanwhile, Self-Determination Theory offers a plausible account of the motivation gains: opportunities to make decisions and progress through activities may have satisfied the need for autonomy; clear, achievable challenges with instant feedback may have built perceived competence; and synchronous, shared participation may have fostered relatedness. The researchers are careful to note that because psychological-need satisfaction was not measured directly, this remains a theoretically grounded interpretation rather than a tested mediation model.

The strongest effect on formative assessment, feedback, and autonomy is particularly telling for teacher education. The gamified activities repeatedly asked students to check their understanding, recognize errors, and monitor their own progress—processes at the heart of both formative assessment theory and self-regulated learning. The structured games may have made these regulatory processes more visible and immediate than conventional coursework typically does. Notably, participants were not merely experiencing the tools as students; as future teachers, they were simultaneously evaluating how such activities could be adapted to their own classrooms, an experience the authors connect to the TPACK framework, which emphasizes the coordination of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge in effective technology integration.

The study is not without limitations, and the authors are candid about them. The single-group pre-post design lacked a comparison group, meaning maturation, testing effects, or contextual influences cannot be ruled out and causal conclusions cannot be drawn definitively. Outcomes were self-reported perceptions rather than direct measures of academic achievement, digital competence, or observable teaching performance. The sample came from a single institution, was overwhelmingly composed of Primary Education students, and included relatively few men, limiting generalizability and the precision of gender comparisons. Both the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses drew on the same pre-intervention sample, reducing the independence of the confirmatory evidence, and the many subgroup comparisons were made without formal statistical adjustment.

Even so, the implications for online teacher education are substantial. Gamified activities can transform synchronous e-learning from passive observation into active participation, and allowing preservice teachers to experience these tools firsthand may prompt reflection on how to adapt them in their future classrooms. The authors caution, however, that tool preference—Genially-Breakout ranked first, followed by Educaplay, Wayground, and WordWall—should not be read as evidence of comparative learning effectiveness. The educational value of any platform depends less on the technology itself than on how its affordances align with instructional objectives, meaningful feedback, and learners’ characteristics. Gamified interventions, they argue, should offer varied forms of participation rather than assuming identical mechanics will motivate every learner.

The team’s central contribution lies in integrating measurement validation with educational application: GAMIF_TICS proved psychometrically sound and longitudinally stable, and its deployment revealed broad-based perceptual gains across motivation, pedagogical value, and self-regulation. The researchers call for future work to cross-validate the instrument in more diverse samples, incorporate comparison conditions and follow-up measurements, and combine perceptual data with academic performance, behavioral observation, and learning analytics—steps that would clarify not just whether gamified digital learning works, but which design features work best, for whom, and under what conditions.