Abstract
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have shown to be almost as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Nonetheless, the students’ improper use of the ITS help system and its intelligent assistance, i. e. gaming the system or help refusal, can impair learning. This paper presents the use of gamification elements, more specifically, points and difficulty levels, as an approach to prevent the behaviors of gaming the system (help abuse and trial-and-error) and help refusal. This system was integrated into a step-based algebraic ITS and it was evaluated in an experiment, during six weeks, involving 60 students from three classes of the \(7^{th}\) year of an elementary school. Each class of students was assigned to one of the three groups: fully gamified, partially gamified and non-gamified, being that they differ by the level of gamification implemented. The students in the two gamified groups had a lower rate of trial-and-error behavior than the non-gamified group. However, we haven’t found statistically significant difference between the fully and partially gamified groups for the trial and error. Also, no differences were observed between the gamified groups and the non-gamified one for the help refusal and help abuse behaviors. The results of this research confirm previous finding that gamification can be used as a non-restrictive approach for the trial-and-error behavior, a form of gaming. On the other hand, we were not able to show that gamification can prevent help refusal and abuse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Baker, R.S.: Designing intelligent tutors that adapt to when students game the system. Ph. D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (2005)
Barna, B., Fodor, S.: An empirical study on the use of gamification on IT courses at higher education. In: Auer, M.E., Guralnick, D., Simonics, I. (eds.) ICL 2017. AISC, vol. 715, pp. 684–692. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73210-7_80
Campbell, D.T., Stanley, J.C.: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research. Ravenio Books, Cortina (2015)
Dichev, C., Dicheva, D.: Gamifying education: what is known, what is believed and what remains uncertain: a critical review. IJAIED 14(1), 9 (2017)
Faghihi, U., Brautigam, A., Jorgenson, K., Martin, D., Brown, A., Measures, E., Maldonado-Bouchard, S.: How gamification applies for educational purpose specially with college algebra. Procedia Comput. Sci. 41, 182–187 (2014)
Field, A., Miles, J., Field, Z.: Discovering Statistics using R. Sage, London (2012)
González, C., Mora, A., Toledo, P.: Gamification in intelligent tutoring systems. In: International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality, pp. 221–225. ACM Press, New York (2014)
Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., Sarsa, H.: Does gamification work? – a literature review of empirical studies on gamification. In: HICSS, pp. 3025–3034. IEEE (2014)
Huang, W.H.Y., Soman, D.: Gamification of Education. Behavioural Economics in Action. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (2013)
Hume, G., Michael, J., Rovick, A., Evens, M.: Hinting as a tactic in one-on-one tutoring. J. Learn. Sci. 5(1), 23–47 (1996)
Jaques, P.A., Seffrin, H., Rubi, G., Morais, F., Ghilardi, C., Bittencourt, I.I., Isotani, S.: Rule-based expert systems to support step-by-step guidance in algebraic problem solving: the case of the tutor PAT2MATH. Expert Syst Appl. 40(14), 5456–5465 (2013)
Kapp, K.M.: The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. Wiley, New York (2012)
Long, Y., Aleven, V.: Gamification of joint student/system control over problem selection in a linear equation tutor. In: Trausan-Matu, S., Boyer, K.E., Crosby, M., Panourgia, K. (eds.) ITS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8474, pp. 378–387. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07221-0_47
Pedro, L., Isotani, S.: Explorando o Impacto da Gamificação na Redução do Gaming the System em um Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizagem. In: Anais dos Workshops do V CBIE (Concurso de Teses e Dissertações), pp. 81–90 (2016)
da Rocha Seixas, L., Gomes, A.S., de Melo Filho, I.J.: Effectiveness of gamification in the engagement of students. Comput. Hum. Behav. 58, 48–63 (2016)
Vanlehn, K.: The behavior of tutoring systems. Int. J. Artif. Intell. Educ. 16(3), 227–265 (2006)
Vanlehn, K.: The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems, and other tutoring systems. Educ. Psychol. 46(4), 197–221 (2011)
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the following research funding agencies of Brazil: CAPES, CNPq and FAPERGS.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Azevedo, O., de Morais, F., Jaques, P.A. (2018). Exploring Gamification to Prevent Gaming the System and Help Refusal in Tutoring Systems. In: Pammer-Schindler, V., Pérez-Sanagustín, M., Drachsler, H., Elferink, R., Scheffel, M. (eds) Lifelong Technology-Enhanced Learning. EC-TEL 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11082. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98572-5_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98572-5_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98571-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98572-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)