The effects of a gamified morphological awareness intervention on students' cognitive, motivational and affective outcomes

Purpose: Morphological awareness (MA), the ability to reflect on and manipulate the smallest language units within a word, has been identified as an essential metalinguistic awareness to predict literacy development. In this study, we examine whether an online gamified English MA programme is more effective than physical face-to-face instruction in terms of cognitive, motivational and affective learning outcomes. Method: We applied a quasi-experimental design using a sample of 33 students in an intervention group (gamified MA programme) and 49 in a control group (face-to-face programme). Both programmes were 8 hours in duration (30 minutes/session for 16 sessions). Students' cognitive, motivational and affective learning outcomes were evaluated before and after delivery of the programmes. We took an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach, in which qualitative data from semi-structured interviews were used to validate the quantitative results. Results: The intervention group performed significantly better than the control group in MA and intrinsic motivation. No differences were found for word reading, reading comprehension or affective engagement. The qualitative analyses of the interview responses revealed in detail the students' perceptions of gamified learning. Conclusion: The findings provide evidence for the beneficial effects of gamified learning experiences in terms of cognitive and motivational outcomes in comparison to face-to-face instruction. Copyright © 2022 British Educational Research Association.