Journal of Advanced Practices in Nursing

Student Built Gamification

Abstract

Aaron McColpin

Background Pharmacology is one of the single most substantial parts of the National Council Licensure Examination-Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) exam (~19%) which is a standardized psychometric exam. Gamification is applying game elements in non-game settings to influence an individual’s behavior in doing something they would not have wanted to do otherwise by giving them a reason to Method The objective of this study is to study the effect of a student self-developed pharmacology game in a nursing pharmacology course to improve their depth of understanding of the subject. Results The majority of questions came from a third of the class who participated with multiple questions created. Students who worked over three hours of question writing and game participation correlated 0.66 with a higher passing grade on a national pharmacology benchmark testing exam. The younger student did play the game more often but did not write more questions than their older peers. Conclusion Students who participated in question writing and game participation had significantly higher scores than students' who did not participate in the question writing or game participation.