Gamification as an Innovative Approach for the Assessment of Procedural Knowledge

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI tools like ChatGPT 4.5 have greatly improved the ease of obtaining answers to questions, thereby diminishing the importance of memorizing declarative knowledge while increasing the significance of procedural knowledge required in the problem-solving process. However, conventional assessment approaches such as paper-based assessments still focus on assessing declarative knowledge; these are difficult to adapt to the challenges of the AI era. This study aims to explore an innovative approach for the assessment of procedural knowledge, with a specific emphasis on gamification. This study employs a comprehensive approach involving an experimental research method, a case study, and a questionnaire survey. A total of 151 undergraduate students were recruited and randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group for the experiment. We compared performance outcomes between a gamification-based assessment and paper-based assessment. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the gamification-based assessment, demonstrating its superiority over the paper-based assessment in assessing procedural knowledge. The findings of the paper are not only applicable to assess knowledge in emergency situations such as fire safety but can also be applied to the assessment of procedural knowledge across various academic subjects within educational institutions.