EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF GAMIFICATION AND LEARNING THOUGH AN APP IN AUTHENTIC LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

The notion of social learning was used as the main theoretical framework for investigating Bandura’s learning through observation or imitation. Social learning is a change in understanding that arises from interactions with others and as a process of proactivity for desirable outcomes. In this study, the version of social learning that we adopt for this study argues that our understanding of concepts and processes is socially constructed through conversations about the matter in question, which is consumer education and financial literacy, and through grounded and situated interactions. This perspective focuses on how we learn rather than simply on what we learn. An application developed to facilitate the gathering of students’ responses to the above-mentioned items which we had intended to measure successfully captured student and teacher participants responses through the application and these were documented as backend data for data retrieval and analysis. Learning is therefore seen as engaging individuals in a series of processes and practices within which knowledge, understanding and ideas are produced as social accomplishments by participants and in this study, through a mobile app. In this financial literacy project, students’ use of the mobile application in a shopping mall for learning provided insights of how this can complement academic learning through gamification.