We examined the use and effectiveness of an incentive system—one of the five elements of a theory-based motivational architecture in educational games that we proposed—in a computer-based physics game on students' learning and performance. The incentive system's purpose was to motivate students to access learning supports designed to facilitate content knowledge acquisition (i.e., content-related supports) and minimize the use of solution videos (i.e., game-related supports). Students (n = 199) could earn game money by accessing content-related supports but had to pay to watch solution videos. Results indicated that the incentive system effectively increased how often students viewed content-related supports and decreased their reliance on solution videos. Furthermore, students who viewed more content-related supports showed higher posttest scores and solved more game levels compared to those who watched fewer supports, controlling for pretest scores. Solution videos, however, appeared to have no effect on either posttest scores or number of levels solved. Finally, our analysis of students' behavioral data, extracted from log files, confirmed that students did not abuse solution videos. We conclude by proposing areas of interest for future research.

我们在关于学生学习和表现的基于计算机的物理游戏中，研究了激励系统的使用和有效性，该系统是我们提出的基于理论的教育游戏激励体系的五个要素之一。激励系统的目的是激励学生获得旨在促进内容知识获取的学习支持（即与内容相关的支持），并最大限度地减少使用解决方案视频的使用（即与游戏相关的支持）。学生（n = 199）可以通过获取与内容相关的支持来赚钱，但必须付费观看解决方案视频。结果表明，奖励制度有效地增加了学生观看与内容相关的支持的频率，并减少了他们对解决方案视频的依赖。此外，与观看内容支持较少的学生（控制预测试分数）相比，观看与内容相关的支持更多的学生显示出更高的测验分数，并且解决了更多游戏问题。然而，解决方案视频似乎对测验分数或解决的水平数量没有影响。最后，我们对从日志文件中提取的学生行为数据的分析证实，学生没有滥用解决方案视频。最后，我们提出了未来研究感兴趣的领域。