Content area
Full Text
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the phenomena of "gaming the system," where a learner attempts to succeed in an educational environment by exploiting properties of the system's help and feedback rather than by attempting to learn the material. Developing environments that respond constructively and effectively to gaming depends upon understanding why students choose to game. In this article, we present three studies, conducted with two different learning environments, which present evidence on which student behaviors, motivations, and emotions are associated with the choice to game the system. We also present a fourth study to determine how teachers' perspectives on gaming behavior are similar to, and different from, researchers' perspectives and the data from our studies. We discuss what motivational and attitudinal patterns are associated with gaming behavior across studies, and what the implications are for the design of interactive learning environment.
In recent years, there has been increasing evidence that students choose to use interactive learning environments in a surprising variety of ways (Wood & Wood, 1999; Aleven, McLaren, Roll, & Koedinger, 2004; Baker, Corbett, Koedinger, Wagner, et al., 2004; Mostow et al., 2002; Arroyo & Woolf, 2005; Stevens & Soller, 2005), and that some choices are associated with poorer learning (Baker, Corbett, Koedinger, Wagner, et al., 2004; Beck, 2005; Aleven, McLaren, Roll, & Koedinger, 2006). In particular, one category of behavior, termed "gaming the system," has been repeatedly found to be associated with poorer learning (Baker, Corbett, Koedinger, Wagner, et al., 2004; Baker, Roll, Corbett, & Koedinger, 2005; Beck; Walonoski & Heffernan, 2006a). Baker (2005) defined gaming the system as "attempting to succeed in an educational environment by exploiting properties of the system rather than by learning the material and trying to use that knowledge to answer correctly."
Gaming behaviors have been observed in a variety of types of learning environments, from educational games (Klawe, 1998; Magnussen & Misfeldt, 2004) to online course discussion forums (Cheng & Vassileva, 2005), and have been repeatedly documented in one type of interactive learning environment, intelligent tutoring systems (Aleven, 2001; Baker, Corbett, Koedinger, & Wagner, et al., 2004; Beck, 2005; Mostow et al., 2002; Murray & vanLehn, 2005; Schofield, 1995; Wood & Wood, 1999). Across the systems studied, a reasonably substantial minority of...