-- 
Andrew Olney, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Institute for Intelligent Systems
The University of Memphis
365 Innovation Drive
Memphis, TN 38152



Title: Towards Understanding Why Students "Game the System" Within
Educational Technology
------------------------

Abstract:
Students use educational software in a considerable
variety of ways. In this talk, I will present research towards
understanding what factors lead students to engage in specific
behaviors that result in poorer learning, focusing on students'
choices to "game the system", attempting to succeed in a learning
environment by exploiting properties of the system rather than by
learning the material and trying to use that knowledge to answer
correctly.

I will discuss the relationships between gaming the system and
students' affect, and how small-scale differences in
the design of educational software can impact whether a student
chooses to game the system. I will also discuss our work to develop
automated detectors
of gaming behavior that have served as the basis for the
development of automated responses to gaming behavior.

-------------------------

Bio

Dr. Ryan Shaun Joazeiro de Baker (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rsbaker/) is
a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the
Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center and the Human-Computer
Interaction Institute, at Carnegie Mellon University.
He is also the Technical Director of the Pittsburgh Science of
Learning Center DataShop
(https://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/about/), the world's largest public
repository for data on the interaction
between students and educational software. He is the Associate Editor
of the Journal of Educational Data Mining,
and was the Program Chair (along with WPI's Joseph Beck) of the First
International Conference on Educational
Data Mining.

He develops and uses methods for mining the data that comes out of the
interactions between students and
educational software, in order to better understand how students
respond to educational software, and how
these responses impact their learning. He studies these issues within
intelligent tutors and educational games.
He used machine learning and quantitative field observation to develop
the first automated detectors of gaming the system
and off-task behavior within educational software.

----------------------------------------------------


Dynamics of Novice Programmer Affect and Behavior

Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo
Associate Professor
Department of Information Systems and Computer Science
Incoming Director of International Programs
Ateneo de Manila University


We study novice programmer affect and behaviors within the first nine
weeks of a CS1 programming course.  We determine whether these affective
states and behaviors vary significantly over time.  If so, can these
variations be indicative of curricular bottlenecks?  We determine
whether any of these affective states or behaviors are predictive of
achievement.  Finally, we determine whether any of these constructs can
be automatically detected.  To these ends, we used a combination of
human observation, midterm test scores, and logs of student interactions
with the compiler within an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
We found that confusion, boredom and engagement in IDE-related on-task
conversation are associated with lower achievement.  We found that a
student’s midterm score can be tractably predicted with simple measures
such as the student’s average number of errors, number of pairs of
compilations in error, number pairs of compilations with the same error,
pairs of compilations with the same edit location and pairs of
compilations with the same error location. This creates the potential to
respond to evidence that a student is at-risk for poor performance
before they have even completed a programming assignment.  We also found
that student frustration can be predicted after five lab periods based
on consecutive pairs of compilations with the same edit location,
consecutive pairs of compilations with the same error, average time
between compilations, and total errors.

Ma. Mercedes (Didith) T. Rodrigo is an Associate Professor and former
Chair of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Department of Information
Systems and Computer Science in the Philippines.  She is also the
University’s incoming Director of International Programs.  Her
background is in computer science and educational technology.  She
teaches subjects on programming, instructional software design, learning
theory, and HCI.  She has managed or assisted with multimedia
educational software development projects for the Ateneo as well as for
the Philippines public school system.  Over the last two years, she
received grants in excess of 2.5 million pesos to support her research
on affect, behavior, and learning among undergraduate novice programmers
as well as grade school and high school students.  Didith is a visiting
fellow on a Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship visiting with the PSLC
from October 2008 to the end of March 2009.