A desire to be taught: Instructional consequences of intrinsic
motivation M.R. Lepper, D.I. Cordova 1992 Motivation and Emotion
v16 no3 p187-208 This review of research on using games to teach
brings out the following points: 1) If it is possible to "win"
an educational game without learning, 3rd-5th-grade students
will learn less than if taught traditionally, playing in a
"rapid, repetitive, mindless fashion." 2)If a learning task is
set in the context of a story, whether or not the students
prefers that story to the others available, the student will
learn more. Students preferred story-context problems to
unembellished ones. 3) Students offered an extrinsic reward for
finding the correct answer were less effective at problem-
solving and less confident.