Tailored gamification in education: A literature review and future agenda

Abstract Gamification has been widely used to design better educational systems aiming to increase students’ concentration, motivation, engagement, flow experience, and others positive experiences. With advances in research on gamification in education, over the past few years, many studies have highlighted the need to tailor the gamification design properties to match individual students’ needs, characteristics and preferences. Thus, different studies have been conducted to personalize the gamification in education. However, the results are still contradictory and need to be better understood to advance this field. To provide a complete understanding of this research domain, we conducted a systematic literature review to summarize the results and discussions on studies that cover the field of tailored gamified education. Following a systematic process, we analysed 2108 studies and identified 19 studies to answer our research questions. The results indicate that most of the studies only consider students’ gamer types to tailor the systems, and most of the experiments do not provide sufficient statistical evidence, especially regarding learning performance using tailored gamified systems. Based on the results, we also provided an agenda with different challenges, opportunities, and research directions to improve the literature on tailored gamification in education. Our study contributes to the field of gamification design in education.