The Impact of Off-task and Gaming Behaviors on Learning: Immediate or Aggregate?

  • Authors:
  • Mihaela Cocea;Arnon Hershkovitz;Ryan S. J. d. Baker

  • Affiliations:
  • London Knowledge Lab, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK;Knowledge Technology Lab, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Israel;Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Learning Systems that Care: From Knowledge Representation to Affective Modelling
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Both gaming the system (taking advantage of the system's feedback and help to succeed in the tutor without learning the material) and being off-task (engaging in behavior that does not involve the system or the learning task) have been previously shown to be associated with poorer learning. In this paper we investigate two hypotheses about the mechanisms that lead to this reduced learning: (a) less learning within individual steps (immediate harmful impact) and (b) overall learning loss due to fewer opportunities to practice (aggregate harmful impact). We show that gaming tends to have immediate harmful impact while off-task tends to have aggregated harmful impact on learning.