The Effects of Collaborative Reading Annotation System with Gamified Mechanisms on Reading Comprehension Performance

Many studies have confirmed that learners preceding prospective sharing and interactive discussion to clarify text meaning through online reading annotation could effectively facilitate reading comprehension performance. Based on the above-mentioned reasons, [1] proposed a web-based collaborative reading annotation system (WCRAS) with a gamification mechanism to motivate students' annotations behaviors and promote students' reading comprehension performance. Although their study confirmed WCRAS can facilitate learners to make significantly more reading and response annotations and higher immersive experience and social interaction, the difference in reading comprehension performance between the two groups respectively has not been found. This might indicate a lack of connection between the gamification design and the reading comprehension processes. This study thus presents a novel gamification mechanism based on WCRAS with badges, stage missions, challenges, level tasks, and gamification board to improve the gamification mechanism designed for WCRAS in ŜIJŞ. It intends to discuss the effects of the WCRAS with the novel gamification mechanism on learners' reading comprehension performance. In this study, 48 fifth grade students from two classes in an elementary school in Central Taiwan were recruited as the research participants. The experimental results show that students in the experimental group significantly outperformed those in the control group on reading comprehension performance and three reading competency indicators. According to the class observation of the experiments, several suggestions are provided for further system improvement and future studies.