Inclusive education aims at offering equal learning abilities to all learners, inclusive those who have Specific Learning Disabilities (van SLDS) that tend to face obstacles associated with focus, long-term motivation, and persistence of tasks and motivation to academic activities. The conventional teaching methods often do not support these various learning requirements, and this ends in low attendance and low academic development. To address these issues, gamification has been proposed as a new method of teaching that incorporates the elements of game design, such as points, rewards, levels, and instant feedback into the education setting to increase the level of engagement and motivation in learners. In the context of inclusive learning, gamification provides an opportunity to establish interactive, scaffolding, and adaptive learning experiences that will support and encourage an active engagement of learners with different cognitive profiles. The current research set out to observe the relevance of gamification plans in enhancing learning activity among students having SLDs in inclusive schools. The quantitative research method with a quasi-experimental study design, that is a pre-test and post-test control group design, was used, to compare the level of student engagement experienced by students who were exposed to a gamified instruction with that of students who were taught using conventional teaching methods. The sample was limited to sixty students of primary level with SLDs who were enrolled in the inclusive classrooms of school based on purposive sampling and equally split into experimental group and control group. The scale of Learning Engagement was used to gather data in order to measure behavioural participation, persisting in working on a task and motivation of a learner with previously proven validity and internal consistency between the items through review by experts and Cronbach’s alpha. The experimental group was involved in the gamified instructional activities as a six-week project, including such structured components as the challenges, rewards, and tracking the progress, and whereas the control group was involved in standard instructions without gamified elements. To find differences between and within groups, data analysis and statistics were performed based on descriptive and inferential t-tests, independent and paired samples t-tests, respectively. The results showed statistically significant improvements in the level of engagement between the children in the experimental condition and the control group demonstrating the positive role of gamification conditions in the participation of learners, their motivation, and persistence. The paper emphasizes the pedagogical importance of incorporating gamification into the inclusive education as a way to assist the learning process of learners with SLDs by promoting their engagement and generating meaningful learning experiences. It also indicates that gamified instructional approaches may be used to add responsive and inclusive instructions, but future studies are suggested to investigate the impact in the long term on academic achievement and other developmental outcomes.
Maria (Wed,) studied this question.