The effect of gamified e-quiz on EFL vocational students' reading comprehension achievement

Abstract

This study investigated the comparative effects of gamified and conventional electronic quizzes on the reading comprehension achievement of Indonesian EFL vocational students. Employing a quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group pretest–posttest design, the study involved 72 tenth-grade students from a public vocational high school in East Java, Indonesia. The experimental group (n = 36) was assessed using a gamified e-quiz platform (Quizizz), while the control group (n = 36) used a conventional e-quiz platform (ProProfs). Both groups received identical instructional materials and reading comprehension instruction focusing on descriptive texts over a six-week intervention period. Data were collected through a validated 30-item multiple-choice reading comprehension test administered as both pretest and posttest. Statistical analysis using independent samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference in posttest scores between the two groups (p < .05), with the control group outperforming the experimental group. The effect size was large (Cohen’s d = −1.56), indicating a substantial practical difference favoring the conventional e-quiz platform. The findings suggest that, for cognitively demanding tasks such as EFL reading comprehension, conventional e-quiz formats with minimal extraneous features may support deeper cognitive processing more effectively than highly gamified assessments. This study contributes to the growing body of research on technology-enhanced assessment by highlighting the importance of aligning digital assessment design with cognitive task demands, particularly in vocational EFL contexts.