Game On: Nigerian Economics Students Learn Better When Classrooms Play

Economics has long been taught with chalk, talk, and the occasional graph scrawled across a whiteboard, but a new study from Nigeria suggests that students whose classrooms borrow the mechanics of games report a strikingly different experience. In research published in SN Social Sciences, Joseph K. Achua of the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja and Patricia N. Mando of Joseph Saawuan Tarka University in Makurdi compared undergraduate economics students who had experienced gamified instruction with those who had not, and found consistent, statistically robust differences in engagement, motivation-related responses, and self-reported retention and understanding. The work is among the first multi-institutional examinations of gamification exposure in undergraduate economics education in a developing economy, and it arrives at a moment when economics departments worldwide are still wrestling with how to move beyond lecture-dominated formats.

The study employed a cross-sectional comparative mixed-methods design, a structure that allows researchers to capture both the numerical size of a difference and the human context in which it occurs. A total of 246 economics students from five purposively selected Nigerian universities took part. Of these, 47 students reported prior exposure to gamified learning, while 199 reported none. Students were sampled within study-level strata, a technique that helps ensure the comparison groups are drawn in a structured way across institutions rather than haphazardly. Alongside the survey data, the researchers gathered qualitative responses from 12 participants, comprising five instructors and seven students drawn from the sampled institutions, providing a window into the classroom realities behind the numbers.

On the quantitative side, the analysis was deliberately thorough. The researchers applied descriptive statistics to characterise the sample, then used Student’s t test and Welch’s t test to compare the two groups, complementing these with one-way ANOVA and Welch’s ANOVA. The inclusion of Welch’s procedures matters: unlike the classical tests, they do not assume that the two groups have equal variances, and methodologists have increasingly argued that they should be the default choice in real-world data where homogeneity of variance cannot be guaranteed. The team also calculated Hedges’ g, a standardised effect size measure that corrects for small-sample bias and expresses the difference between groups in units of pooled standard deviation, making results comparable across studies. The pattern of results held across both equal-variance and unequal-variance procedures, with large standardised differences favouring students with prior gamification exposure.

What did that mean in practice? Students who had encountered gamified elements in their economics courses reported higher engagement, stronger motivation-related responses, and better self-reported retention and understanding of course material than their non-exposed peers. The consistency of the findings across multiple statistical procedures strengthens the case that these are not artefacts of a particular analytical choice. It is worth emphasising what the study measured: these are self-reported outcomes rather than independently assessed examination scores, a limitation the design shares with much of the engagement literature. Even so, the alignment of three distinct outcome dimensions, engagement, motivation, and perceived learning, suggests a coherent pattern rather than a statistical fluke.

The qualitative strand of the study grounded these numbers in lived classroom experience. Drawing on the reflexive thematic analysis tradition associated with Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, the researchers examined open-ended responses from instructors and students and situated the quantitative patterns within four interlocking themes: classroom interaction, conceptual accessibility, technological constraints, and institutional support. In other words, gamification did not operate in a vacuum. Its perceived benefits were entangled with how much interaction it fostered between students and instructors, how accessible it made abstract economic concepts, whether the technological infrastructure of the university could sustain it, and how far institutional policies and support systems encouraged or obstructed its adoption.

That contextual framing is particularly important in the Nigerian setting, where digital transformation in higher education faces well-documented challenges. The qualitative accounts pointed to technological constraints, unreliable infrastructure, uneven access to devices and connectivity, and institutional support as decisive factors in whether gamified approaches could take root. The authors frame their findings as offering practical considerations for context-sensitive pedagogical planning, curriculum reflection, staff development, and sustainable implementation across diverse university settings. The message is not simply that gamification works, but that its success depends on careful adaptation to local conditions rather than wholesale importation of designs developed in well-resourced Western classrooms.

The study builds on a substantial international literature. Gamification, defined in a widely cited 2011 paper by Sebastian Deterding and colleagues as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, has been extensively studied in higher education, with systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including work by Michael Sailer and colleagues, reporting generally positive effects on psychological need satisfaction, motivation, and learning outcomes. In economics education specifically, the persistence of the chalk-and-talk lecture format has been documented across successive national surveys, and recent symposia and reviews have called for greater pedagogical innovation. Yet the evidence base has been skewed toward developed economies, and researchers have repeatedly cautioned about the novelty effect, the possibility that early enthusiasm for gamified systems fades as the novelty wears off, a concern highlighted in longitudinal work by Michael Hanus and Jesse Fox.

Against that backdrop, the Nigerian study adds a valuable data point from a context where the constraints and affordances differ markedly. The theoretical scaffolding draws on self-determination theory, the influential framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that motivation flourishes when psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are satisfied. Game mechanics such as points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges are thought to work precisely because they can feed these needs, and the motivation-related responses measured in the study are consistent with instruments rooted in that tradition, such as the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory maintained by the Center for Self-Determination Theory. The Nigerian findings suggest that these motivational pathways can operate in developing-economy classrooms too, provided the surrounding conditions allow them to.

Methodologically, the study shows a commendable attention to measurement quality and research ethics. The authors report reliability considerations for their instruments, referencing the ongoing debate about coefficient alpha and its alternatives, and their qualitative sampling was guided by established principles of information power and data saturation, which determine how many interviews are enough to capture the variability in a population. Data handling followed the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, with informed consent, anonymisation of the quantitative dataset before public archiving, and withholding of qualitative data from public sharing to protect participant confidentiality. The anonymised dataset, titled Gamification in Economics Education: Evidence from Developing Economies, has been made publicly available in the Mendeley Data repository, an act of transparency that other researchers can build upon. The authors declared no competing interests and received no external funding for the work.

The caveats are worth stating plainly. The cross-sectional design captures a snapshot rather than a causal trajectory, and the imbalance between the exposed and non-exposed groups, 47 versus 199 students, reflects the current rarity of gamification in Nigerian economics teaching as much as any sampling decision. Self-reported retention and understanding are proxies, not direct measures of achievement, and purposive selection of five universities limits generalisability. Nevertheless, the large standardised differences, the agreement across multiple statistical procedures, and the convergent qualitative evidence make a compelling case that gamification exposure is associated with a meaningfully better learning experience in this context. For economics departments in Nigeria and comparable settings, the study offers a nudge: the tools of game design, deployed thoughtfully and with attention to infrastructure and staff development, may help transform a discipline often perceived as abstract and forbidding into something students actively want to engage with. The full article is available in SN Social Sciences, volume 6, article 411.

Subject of Research: Gamification exposure and its effects on engagement, motivation, and self-reported learning in undergraduate economics education in Nigeria

Article Title: Gamification exposure in undergraduate economics education in Nigeria: a cross-sectional comparative mixed-methods study

Article References: Achua, J. K., & Mando, P. N. (2026). Gamification exposure in undergraduate economics education in Nigeria: a cross-sectional comparative mixed-methods study. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 411. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01708-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01708-x

Keywords: gamification, economics education, Nigeria, higher education, student engagement, motivation, mixed-methods, self-determination theory, educational technology, developing economies, pedagogy, cross-sectional study