In the past decades, educationalists were fighting with video games since students naturally prefer to play video games rather than spending time on “more meaningful” activities such as book reading. After the long-term fruitless struggle, educationalists began to consider using the engaging characteristics of video games on top of formal education for enhanced teaching results (Rueckert, Pico, Kim, & Calero Sánchez, 2020) . Under this guideline, the concept gamification gained popularity in the field of education for both practitioners and researchers (Baldauf, Brandner, & Wimmer, 2017; Cruaud, 2018; Honório, Moura, Brito, Menezes, & de Barros, 2018; Werbach, 2014), which refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding, Sicart, et al., 2011). Accordingly, gamified learning, also named educational refers to the use of gamification for educational purposes. Though gamification does not necessarily connect with digital devices, gamified learning tools in the current thesis refer to the education websites, systems, software, or mobile applications that use gamification techniques.

Despite gathering academic interests, the actual implementation of gamification in school contexts is not prevalent (Luo, Brown, & O'Steen, 2021). It is important to understand and improve teachers’ willingness of accepting a new approach or a new technology since teachers’ attitudes affect the selection, implementation, and evaluation of the approach/technology. The effectiveness of a new approach/technology is also “largely depend on” teachers’ acceptance (Bourgonjon et al., 2013, p. 22). However, a large number of previous studies focused on the technology and its impact, with the role of teachers neglected (Bourgonjon et al., 2013).

Bearing the aforementioned gap in mind, this author aims to explore the factors influencing secondary school teachers’ acceptance intention to gamified learning tools in formal education. Two approaches were conducted: the open-ended survey that involved 347 teachers for general perspectives, and the face-to-face interview that involved 14 teachers for detailed explanations. This author obtained abundant data that reveal in-depth explanations, which were summarised into 16 themes. The specification of the 16 themes enables researchers to better understand what motivates teachers to use this new technology, what hinders teachers from accepting it, how to enhance the motives, and how to address the hindrances. The interview responses were furtherly being shaped into survey items, which were drafted and examined following the typical scale development and evaluation guidelines by DeVellis (2003) and Robertson (2017). The survey study involved 512 valid participants. This study aims to answer three main research questions (RQs) as follows:

RQ 1: What are the factors contributing to teachers’ acceptance intention of gamified learning tools in secondary schools?

RQ 2: What items should be contained in the scale measuring teachers’ acceptance intention of gamified learning tools in secondary schools (TAI-GLT)?

RQ 3: How reliable and valid is the scale measuring teachers’ acceptance intention of gamified learning tools in secondary schools (TAI-GLT)?

It is noteworthy that the scale evaluation revealed surprising results. Based on the interview responses, this author conceptualised a framework containing six main factors that contribute to teachers’ acceptance intention to educational gamification, including perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEoU), perceived risks, facilitating conditions, and control variables. Surprisingly, the results indicated that only two factors can be retained in the proposed framework (PU and PEoU). However, PU and PEoU in the current research contexts brought new connotations, which is of significance for future studies. For example, while most of the previous studies use PEoU to indicate the PEOU of the technological or the devices, findings of this study revealed that the concept of PEoU also indicates the PEoU of the implementation process. In other words, the perceived ease of use of gamified learning tools in secondary-school contexts is connected with not only the cumbersomeness in using digital devices but also the effort-demandingness of dealing with correspondent issues such as classroom discipline management.

To furtherly understand the topic, this author added an interview and a survey study to explore the determinants of PU and PEoU of gamified learning tools, which involved 263 and 239 participants respectively. Under the suggestion of field experts, this author selected foreign language learning as the specific subject. The newly added study aims to answer the following three research questions (RQs):

RQ 4: What are the determinants of teachers’ perceived usefulness (PU) of gamified learning tools (GLT) for foreign language learning in formal education? What items should be contained in the correspondent measuring scale PU- GLT?

RQ 5: What are the determinants of teachers’ perceived ease of use (PEoU) of gamified learning tools (GLT) for foreign language learning in formal education? What items should be contained in the correspondent measuring scale PEoU-GLT?

RQ 6: How reliable and valid are the scales PU-GLT and PEoU-GLT?

The current study presents five main outputs: a redefinition of gamified learning and gamified learning tools; a summary of factors influencing whether secondary teachers accept or resist using gamified learning tools; a theoretical framework that illustrates the contributing factors; a validated survey that measures teachers’ acceptance intention to gamified learning tools; and two validated survey that measure teachers perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEoU) of gamified learning tools respectively. The two scales were named PU-GLT and PEoU-GLT.