The role of culturally-responsive gamification to improve multiethnic students’ self-engagement in Islamic education

Abstract

The cultural-friendly learning environment is considered as an important factor influencing on the students’ self-engagement and become a central challenge that teachers in Islamic educational settings commonly deal with. This study aims to analyze the implementation of an gamified activity for creating a multicultural-situated learning and improving multiethnic students’ self-engagement in Islamic education. A total of 80 sixth graders with various backgrounds from two classes participated in this research. The one class was purposively assigned to the experimental group (N = 40) using the Peacegen gamified platform in learning tolerance, and the other class was the control group (N = 40) using traditional instruction. This study found that, compared to the traditional instruction, the culturally-responsive gamification more effectively helped multiethnic students’ self-engagement in learning tolerance in Bahasa Indonesia subject. Particularly, they had positive feedbacks on the learning process after the culturally-responsive gamification. This result suggests that a culturally-responsive gamification can provide a simulated learning environment that assists teachers to improve the multiethnic students’ self-engagement in Islamic education and subsequently facilitate their deep-learning of tolerance.