BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1643246
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative ICT Strategies for Inclusive Education: Enhancing Teacher Competencies and Student EngagementView all 7 articles
Gamified Hidden-Assessment Platform for Diagnosing ICT Competences and Supporting Career Guidance among Kazakhstani High-School Students
Provisionally accepted
- 1Toraighyrov University, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan
- 2Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, Kazakhstan
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Digitisation is reshaping Kazakhstan's labour market, yet school-based career guidance still relies on paper inventories that fail to uncover students' latent interests in emerging technology domains. We developed Game for Career Guidance (GCG). This bilingual (web-based) platform combines gamification with hidden assessment to profile upper-secondary pupils' competences in programming, cyber-security, web development, graphics/UX, and computer architecture. A sixweek field trial involved 1,865 grade-11 learners from 45 state schools in Pavlodar. Gameplay logs captured unobtrusive event traces, which were converted to Rasch-weighted mastery scores; postsession surveys measured motivation, usability, and state anxiety. Eighty-three per cent of participants reached at least medium mastery in three or more domains, and 92 % completed the tutorial and entered formal play. Mean Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (5.6/7) and System Usability Scale (76/100) scores indicated high engagement and usability, while state-anxiety remained low (1.9/5). Hierarchical models showed that flow significantly predicted mastery after controlling for prior GPA. Qualitative feedback echoed these findings and emphasised the value of authentic microtasks and a seamless Kazakh-Russian interface. The results demonstrate that gamified hidden assessment can motivate learners and deliver fine-grained evidence for counsellors without additional testing time. The open-source architecture offers a readily scalable blueprint for modernising career guidance in other rapidly digitising educational systems.
Keywords: Hidden Assessment, Gamification, Career guidance, Digital skills, Secondary education, Kazakhstan, React Three Fiber, Mixed-methods study
Received: 08 Jun 2025; Accepted: 29 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tokzhigitova, Jarassova, Tokzhigitova, Ospanova and Baizhumanov. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ainur Tokzhigitova, Toraighyrov University, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan
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