Gamified reflection: How interaction design shapes student engagement with prompts Gamification and Metacognitive Reflection

Abstract

Metacognitive reflection ? awareness of one?s learning, feelings, and progress ? is a 21st-century skill of utmost importance in modern education. Yet, as learning increasingly occurs in fast-paced, efficiency-driven digital learning environments, opportunities for deep reflection are often constrained. Metacognitive prompting, which explicitly scaffolds reflection, is commonly conceptualised regarding how much autonomy is afforded to students, whether open-ended or structured. In this study, we investigate how students perceive both styles of prompts, inspired by gamification design, in a digital learning environment. Interviews with eighteen undergraduate students were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis to explore their engagement with the prompts. Students made sense of the structured designs as clear and efficient, while openended prompts were seen as playful but ambiguous. Many students struggled to integrate the prompts into their workflow, especially when the value of reflection was not immediately apparent. These findings suggest that reflective tools in digital learning environments must go beyond simply adding prompts to content but should respect student autonomy and time constraints, while still ensuring that the integrity of the reflection activity is maintained. Insights from this study offer tentative propositions for future research into how gamification can support meaningful metacognitive reflection.