# Digital Gamification to Foster Attitudes Toward Science in Early Childhood Teacher Education
## 4 Discussion
### Limitations and Future Directions  
This study is deliberately framed as a case study, offering a rich and context-bound exploration of how gamification influences preservice early childhood teachers' motivation and attitudes toward science. While this design enables a deep understanding of participants' experiences within a specific course and institutional setting, it also limits the broader generalizability of the findings. The results should be interpreted considering the particular characteristics of the cohort, the instructor's familiarity with gamification, and the local educational context. In this regard, although demographic data were collected, no subgroup analyses were conducted due to the sample's composition: over 94% of participants identified as women, and only 15% had a science-oriented academic background. Under such conditions, disaggregated analyses would lack statistical robustness and could lead to misleading conclusions.  
Another important consideration is the absence of a control group, which limits the ability to attribute the observed changes solely to the gamified intervention. Other factors --such as course content or instructor influence-- may also have contributed to the outcomes. However, the qualitative data offer additional insights by capturing students' own reflections on which aspects of the course influenced their motivation and attitudes. This interpretive layer helps to contextualize the quantitative findings. In addition, students' perceived motivational ratings of individual gamification features (as shown in Table 4) further corroborate that these specific elements were experienced as central drivers of engagement and attitude change.  
Building on these reflections, future research should consider using quasi-experimental designs or including comparison groups to strengthen causal inferences and validate these interpretations. Studies should also investigate the long-term effects of gamification on preservice teachers' instructional practices. Longitudinal designs that follow participants into their professional careers could yield valuable insights into whether enhanced self-efficacy and positive attitudes toward science persist and are meaningfully applied in real classroom settings. In particular, researchers could examine how prospective teachers internalize and adapt gamified strategies in their own instructional design once they begin teaching. This line of inquiry would help determine the practical transferability of gamified learning experiences from teacher education programs to early childhood classrooms. Additionally, further exploration of the differential effects of specific gamification elements could help refine the design of more effective and targeted interventions, allowing educators to better tailor strategies to diverse learner profiles. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) also warrant investigation for their potential to personalize and enhance gamified learning. AI-driven platforms could dynamically adjust challenges, rewards, and feedback in response to individual engagement patterns, thereby optimizing motivation and managing cognitive load more effectively.