Gamification Through the Looking Glass: Perceived Biases and Ethical Concerns of Brazilian Teachers

Gamification applied to education could impact positively (or negatively) students’ psychological and cognitive aspects, such as motivation, engagement and learning performance. Nevertheless, the perceptions of education professionals and their concerns about implicit biases and ethics that emerge from applying gamification to support learning has not been widely explored. Thus, we conducted a qualitative study that aims to identify gamification potential biases and ethical concerns, from teachers’ perspectives, in the Brazilian context. We designed a survey answered by 61 Brazilian teachers, who had not used gamification before - even thought they were aware of its potential benefits. Our results point out that social aspects, difficulties in planning and evaluation, psychological and behavioral impacts, and privacy of students are some of the main concerns related to ethics and biases. This paper contribution focused on providing a list of potential biases and ethical concerns to consider when designing and applying gamification in education.