Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.
A theory is the explanation of why a certain result was found in a study. The explanation should consist of facts and evidence that connects to each other. To have a strong theory you must explain why one fact leads to another fact that leads to the result you got. A theory is according to Robert Sutton and Barry Staw (1995) not references, data, variables, diagrams and hypothesis.
Journal: Computers in Human Behavior
This journal includes articles about the psychological impact of computers on humans. The journal addresses articles about how we use and can use computers for education, training, research and more. It also includes articles about how we can change behaviour, personality, learning and so on with the help of computers. The journal is only about the interaction between humans and the computer and not about the hardware the computer is made of.
Article from the journal: How gamification motivates visits and engagement for online academic dissemination - An empiricial study (Ming-Shiou Kuo, Tsung-Yen Chuang, 2014)
Just like the title is suggesting this article is about gamification. Gamification is when you apply different game mechanics and elements to a non-game context with the intent to motivate and engage the user more.
The purpose of the article is to promote and disseminate academic content by applying gamification to a website called “Learning on Projects of United Promotion for Academia” (LOPUPA, http://lopupa.npust.edu.tw). They looked at what type of game designs were the most effective at achieving this by setting up an online platform for students to use. They then collected quantitative data with the help of Google Analytics and qualitative data with an optional survey.
I feel like throughout the whole article a lot of assumptions were made by Kuo and Chang with no source to back it up. Some of them might seem obvious but I still would like to see some backing of the assertion that “academic information is usually considered to be abstruse and uninteresting” for example, since that is what they are building the usefulness of gamification on.
Kuo and Chang concludes from their results that graphical virtual feedback (trophies, badges etc.), thematic activities and a discussion board are the three most important mechanics to use in gamification. They are trying to give a short explanation and theory of why they got these results but there are some missing links. The website they set up basically contains lots of different games which goals are to educate. Since these games focus on education in different subjects it’s entirely possible that a lot of people will like a game more because the subject interests them more, and not because they like that it has a leaderboard for example. This is not discussed in the article.
Another conclusion they are making is that their expectations of how their website would engage people was met. Even though they did not make any expectations in the text and they did not have any other website to compare it to. The only thing they had in their results was the statistics from Google Analytics on their website. Which I think makes for a poor argument that their expectations were met.
I would say that their main theory in this article is why some game mechanics are more suitable for gamification than others. Even though I don’t fully agree with the conclusion, they are giving us a clear answer to what mechanics are the most effective. However, as I said earlier, the explanation to why they came up with these results is lacking. I would say that this is a theory of type 3 - Prediction (Gregor S, 2006, p. 620, Table 2). Kuo and Chang are clearly showing that some particular game mechanics were more popular and made the students stay longer. But they are making, in my opinion, a very poor attempt explaining why these are related.
The good thing about this type of theory is of course that we can predict results. For example the prediction of weather (Gregor S, 2006, p. 626). The limitation of the theory is also pretty obvious. Correlations between two variables does not necessarily imply a casual relationship (Gregor S, 2006, p. 626).
References:
Gregor S, The Nature of Theory in Information Systems, 2006.
Sutton R. I. & Staw B. M, What Theory is Not, 1995.
Kuo M & Chuang T, How gamification motivates visits and engagement for online academic dissemination - An empiricial study, 2014.
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