Meaningful Gamification for Journalism Students to Enhance Their Critical Thinking Skills

The training of critical thinking skills for journalism students is essential for their professional development. To train journalism students to think critically cannot be achieved in one day. It may take years to transform the mindset of journalism students from a rigid to an open-minded disposition. Thus, education is the starting point to introduce the concept of critical thinking into journalism students. Journalism students are expected to apply knowledge learned from university into everyday life practices in the future. In order to motivate students to train themselves and to practice the learned skills in their everyday life, this study designed a gamified platform to assist the teaching and to promote self training for students after the class. A gamified platform and a blended leaning curriculum were designed for the research purpose. Some gaming elements including goals, challenges and quests, progress, feedback, competition and cooperation, actual grading, visible status, access/unlocking content, freedom of choice, freedom to fail, storytelling, new identities and roles were employed in this gamified platform. During an 18-week experimental instruction period with 32 journalism students, the instructional design included: (a) introduction to critical thinking, (b) introduction to media literacy, (c) introduction to Toulmin's argument model, (d) critical thinking skills, (e) introduction to argument fallacies, (f) media argument fallacies, (g) critical thinking strategies. The Critical Thinking Test Level II (CTT-) and a pretest-posttest control group design were employed in this study. Through repeated measure analysis of variance, it was found that the participants significantly improved their critical thinking skills through the gamified platform with the experimental instruction in a blended learning environment. The findings suggest that the blended learning model developed in this study facilitates "meaningful gamification" experiences and contribute to the development of critical-thinking training for journalism education. Hopefully, this result can contribute to the development of critical thinking training for journalism education in the future.