Abstract
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have been largely used in school settings and considered effective learning tools. However, students’ performance might be impaired by their undesired behaviors. An example of these behaviors is “gaming the system”, which happens when the student tries to mislead the system in order to advance faster in the tasks. Previous works have tried to treat this behavior by blocking student’s actions; however, this restrictive approach has proved to be ineffective. We propose the use of animated pedagogical agents in ITSs as a non-restrictive approach to gaming the system. We believe that an animated pedagogical agent can discourage this behavior by taking two actions: (1) showing it is aware of when students are gaming, and (2) educating students about the negative impact of this behavior on their learning. We implemented this approach in a step-based algebra ITS, and a classroom experiment was conducted with 37 students who used the system for 50 min on average to solve linear equations. Although, due to the design restrictions of the experiment, we could not statistically demonstrate that the presence of the agent decreased the gaming of the system, descriptive statistics of the tutor log data show evidence of a possible positive effect of an aware animated pedagogical agent on students’ behavior, indicating that this approach deserves further investigation.
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Acknowledgement
This work is supported by the following research funding agencies in Brazil: CAPES, CNPq and FAPERGS.
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Nunes, T.M., Bittencourt, I.I., Isotani, S., Jaques, P.A. (2016). Discouraging Gaming the System Through Interventions of an Animated Pedagogical Agent. In: Verbert, K., Sharples, M., Klobučar, T. (eds) Adaptive and Adaptable Learning. EC-TEL 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9891. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45153-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45153-4_11
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