DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A GAMIFIED DRILL-AND-PRACTICE INSTRUCTIONAL APPLICATION FOR UTME USE-OF-ENGLISH PREPARATION

Abstract

Nigerian secondary school leavers continue to record weak outcomes in the Use of English component of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), with vocabulary, comprehension, and grammatical accuracy among the most persistent deficits. Existing digital preparation tools are largely digitised past-question banks with limited motivational design and little documented validation. This study reports the development and validation of a gamified drill-and-practice mobile application for UTME Use-of-English preparation, built using the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model and structured around Chou's Octalysis gamification framework. A needs assessment of 120 Senior Secondary School (SS3) students and 8 English-language teachers in Ilorin, Kwara State, identified vocabulary-in-context, lexis and structure, and oral forms as priority content areas. The resulting application incorporated points, levels, badges, streaks, leaderboards, and adaptive difficulty, each mapped to one or more Octalysis core drives. Content and design validity were established through expert review, while a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental pilot with 64 SS3 students examined learning gains and engagement relative to a non-gamified drill tool. Results showed statistically significant achievement and engagement gains for the experimental group, supporting a replicable ADDIE-Octalysis design template for examination-preparation applications in high-stakes, low-resource contexts