Beyond Motivation and Engagement: Gamified Assessment as a Vehicle for Learner Agency

Gamified assessment has gained increasing attention in higher education because of its potential to improve learners’ motivation, engagement and academic performance. However, the educational value of gamified assessment has been largely explained by these outcomes, providing little theoretical insight into how gamified assessment contributes to the development of self-directed learning. This paper investigates how gamified assessment contributes to self-directed learning beyond motivation and engagement. It uses a synthesis approach to bring together research on gamified assessment, Assessment as Learning, learner agency and self-directed learning to develop a new theoretical account of this relationship. In this paper, learner agency is proposed as the mediating mechanism through which gamified assessment contributes to self-directed learning and introduces the Agency-Enabling Gamified Assessment Framework. The framework is based on Assessment as Learning (AaL) and conceptualises gamified assessment as the creation of structural conditions for learners to actively participate in assessment, interpret feedback, make informed decisions, and progressively take ownership of and responsibility for their learning. These assessment experiences contribute to the development of learner agency and offer a developmental path to self-directed learning. By shifting attention from motivation-centred to agency-centred explanations of gamified assessment, the framework offers a theoretically grounded account of learner development, a foundation for future empirical research and guidance for the design of agency-enabling assessment in higher education.