# Assessing the Effects of Gamification on Enhancing Information Security Awareness Knowledge
## 5 Discussions
Third, contradictory to our expectations, this study did not find statistical differences between two groups in students' attitudes and intentions to comply with IS policies. Achieving awareness knowledge by gamification is an essential outcome of this study but may not be adequate for participants to be confident in IS compliance. This study was consistent with the findings of [PERSON] and [PERSON] [39] that gamification significantly impacts knowledge achievement rather than attitude and intention. The prior literature demonstrated that factors, such as students' self-efficacy regarding response and ability [6; 7], personal norms such as moral commitment [16] or voluntary behaviors [6], or relaxed perception with limited security knowledge [7] may influence individuals' attitudes and intentions. Furthermore, learners with a conscientious personality or strong self-awareness likely prevent faults or opportunistic attacks [7; 21; 22]. Hence, our results implied that gamification provides an effective learning environment for knowledge enhancement but is insufficient to lead to psychological and behavioral outcomes, likely achieved by adding other education settings in gamification [38]. Fourth, the results showed no statistical difference in participants' willingness to learn IS subjects after the experiment. Similar to attitudes and intentions, gamification practice has limited impacts on outcomes such as individuals' willingness for continuous learning. Furthermore, correlations among ISA knowledge and attitude and intention were significant (see Table 2), and the mean values of students' attitudes and intentions among the two groups were higher and similar (see Table 4), implying that IS education itself may generate potential benefits for students' compliance attitudes and intentions without gamification. These results remain to be further studied in the future. The literature suggested varying considerations when addressing the effectiveness of gamification. For example, [PERSON] et al. [44] stressed learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, humanism, and constructivism in game-based learning. [PERSON] et al. [27] suggested that potential moderators such as personality traits or game-related behaviors seem to be missed in current literature. [PERSON] et al. [8] also noted that the design of an educational game is more than software development to achieve the expected educational goals, results, and experience. Consequently, incorporating the factors above may advance the knowledge to the influence of gamification in changing students' perception, attitude, or intention. Fifth, considering gender factors in gamification learning contexts, differences were observed neither in gender influence nor in the interaction between gamification and gender. Unexpectedly, our results were not consistent with previous research on gender differences in ISA scores [19], self-reported security behaviors [18], or levels of ISA and abilities in dealing with security issues [17]. Both male and female students may be interactions, and gamification and the Internet are an inseparable, essential part of their lives. Subjects' previous experiences with video games are also similar. Therefore, gender may not be sufficient to lead to individual differences in the achievement effects. Future studies may incorporate various pedagogies in gamified IS learning to investigate gender differences. Lastly, in addition to contributing to ISA education literature, this study also added new knowledge to research regarding gamification and learning. Consistent with the previous studies [36; 38; 39], this study confirmed that applying gamification to learning contexts generates encouraging outcomes related to knowledge acquisition and achievement.