Stoic Behavior in Hint Seeking when Learning using an Intelligent Tutoring System

Stoic Behavior in Hint Seeking when Learning using an Intelligent Tutoring System Kazuhisa Miwa (miwa@is.nagoya-u.ac.jp) Hitoshi Terai (terai@is.nagoya-u.ac.jp) Nana Kanzaki (kanzaki@cog.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp) Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University Ryuichi Nakaike (nakaike@educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp) Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University fective for learning than passive hint-seeking, in which par- ticipants were given hints proactively when facing errors. Abstract Stoic behavior is defined as a behavior in which students tend not to seek help with a challenge. We investigated two types of stoic behavior: keeping-off behavior, in which students re- strain themselves from requesting help, i.e., keep levels of help support at a minimum, and self-fading behavior, in which stu- dents voluntarily lower levels of support on their own volition. Three experiments were conducted. Overall, results showed that the participants actually exhibited stoic behavior when learning in an actual classroom setting. Self-fading was more difficult than the keeping-off behavior. The participants who maintained levels of support at a minimum through exhibiting active keeping-off behavior achieved greater learning gains, suggesting that stoic behavior resulted in positive impacts on learning. However, our experiment did not detect this effect for self-fading behavior. These experimental results were dis- cussed with the assistance dilemma problem, generally occur- ring in instruction by intelligent tutoring systems. Keywords: Intelligent tutoring system; Help seeking; Assis- tance dilemma. Introduction Recent intelligent tutoring systems include highly interactive features. Such systems give participants various types of feedback such as verification, correct response notification, try again encouragement, error flagging, and elaboration mes- sages (Shute, 2008). In this context, the assistance dilemma has been recognized. Koedinger & Aleven (2007) asked a crucial question: How should learning environments balance assistance giving and withholding to achieve optimal learn- ing? (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007) High assistance sometimes provides successful scaffolding and improves learning, how- ever, it may also elicit superficial responses without consider- ation from the students. In contrast, low assistance sometimes encourages students to make great efforts to learn, while at other times it results in enormous errors and interferes with effective learning. To resolve this issue, the levels of support (LOS) must be adaptively controlled by tutoring systems. Equipping tutoring systems with intelligent functions for help control and optimization of feedback information for participants are important issues. However, students must seek help intelligently. From this perspective, in this study, we investigate students’ active help-seeking behaviors rather than passive help-receiving behaviors, which were managed by intelligent tutoring systems. Razzaq & Heffernan (2011) (Razzaq & Heffernan, 2010) confirmed that active hint- seeking, in which on-demand hints were given, was more ef- Help-seeking is a representative metacognitive activity in learning behavior. Help-seeking is valuable, not only for maximizing learning effects but also for acquiring a domain- independent meta-learning strategy. Some trials have in- structed students using such metacognitive abilities. A domain-independent agent, called Help Tutor, for teaching better help-seeking skills by tracing students actions, was de- veloped (Roll et al., 2006). Such help-seeking support was successful in improving students’ declarative help-seeking knowledge, but did not improve their overall learning (Roll, Aleven, McLaren, & Koedinger, 2007). In more recent tri- als, the Help Tutor improved students’ help-seeking behavior, and the improved help-seeking skills are transferred to learn- ing new domain-level content during the month following the intervention (Roll, Aleven, McLaren, & Koedinger, 2011). To instruct such metacognitive activities, we must learn more about the nature of students’ help-seeking behavior. Students themselves have to manage their help-seeking be- havior to maximize learning effects. However, previous stud- ies have demonstrated that students’ help-seeking behavior does not follow rational principles (Wood & Wood, 1999). Hint abuse is a representative irrational behavior that appears in hint-seeking whereby students tend to seek the most spe- cific hints to find answers rather than acquiring understanding (Aleven & Koedinger, 2000). In this study, we focus on stoic behavior in hint seeking. Stoic behavior is defined as behavior in which students tend not to seek help for their challenge. We will investigate two types of behavior: the keeping-off and self-fading behaviors. Keeping-off behavior is defined as behavior in which students try to solve problems by themselves without a system’s assis- tance. Students restrain themselves from receiving help from a tutoring system even when permitted to do so. This is re- garded as a type of behavior with the purpose of avoiding the hint abuse. On the other hand, we define self-fading behavior as one in which students voluntarily decrease an LOS by their own volition. This behavior is recognized, along with scaf- folding, as a central concept for effective learning. To enable students to effectively learn, scaffolding should be eliminated gradually as learning progresses. In learning by examples, fading methods have also been used as an effective principle