Carelessness and Affect in an Intelligent Tutoring System for Mathematics

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between students' affect and their frequency of careless errors while using an Intelligent Tutoring System for middle school mathematics. A student is said to have committed a careless error when the student's answer is wrong despite knowing the skill required to provide the correct answer. We operationalize the probability that an error is careless through the use of an automated detector, developed using educational data mining, which infers the probability that an error involves carelessness rather than not knowing the relevant skill. This detector is then applied to log data produced by high-school students in the Philippines using a Cognitive Tutor for scatterplots. We study the relationship between carelessness and affect, triangulating between the detector of carelessness and field observations of affect. Surprisingly, we find that carelessness is common among students who frequently experience engaged concentration. This finding implies that a highly engaged student may paradoxically become overconfident or impulsive, leading to more careless errors. In contrast, students displaying confusion or boredom make fewer careless errors. Further analysis over time suggests that confused and bored students have lower learning overall. Thus, their mistakes appear to stem from a genuine lack of knowledge rather than carelessness.

Effects of HOTS-based Module Approach on Pupil’s Errors in the Topic of Measurement and Geometry in Urban and Rural Schools

“…In this study, this showed that although pupils' errors were often due to misconceptions, the teacher need to be aware that pupils can and do made careless errors. This type of errors may occur because pupils were competitive and rush in their work to finish it [16,45] stated that pupils who frequently experience involvement of concentration in mathematics, displayed carelessness. On the other hand, Clement [23] stated that there was a positive relationship between carelessness and confidence, such that pupils who understand the content and believed that they can answer the problem, made higher percentage in careless errors.…”

Toward the Design of a Cognitive Tutor for Algebra with Gamification: A Survey of State-of-the-Art

“…Finally, as a general synthesis, in Table 2, a list of papers from 2012 to date arranged chronologically are shown, these articles were selected because they include one or more of the topics analyzed in this paper, plus the main theme that has to see with Tutorial Systems. The first column of Table 2 (tagged with R) indicates the reference of the paper, the numbers of the other columns, organized as follows, indicate the topics in [20] x x x 1 [27] x x x x x 22 [47] x x x 2 [48] x x 48 [44] x x x x 0 [13] x x x 12 [24] x x 0 [40] x x x x 1 [49] x x x 1 [50] x x x x 35 [42] x x x 0 [51] x x x x x x 33 [52] x x x x 1 [53] x x x x x 13 [33] x x 1 [54] x x x 327 [30] x x x x 1 [21] x x x x 1 [38] x x x 3 [36] x x x x x 7 [6] x x x x 4 [28] x x x x x 26 [4] x x x 0 [55] x x x 6 [14] x x x 17 [5] x x x x 20 [19] x x x 5 [56] x x x 18 [45] x x 9 [57] x x x 195 [37] x x 3 [16] x…”

A Case for Intranet-Based Online Portal for Undergraduate Computer Science Teaching

“…On the negative side, use of such systems are known to create disengagement in the users' minds. As mentioned in [3] the different forms of disengagement from the task at hand include engaging in off-task behavior such as net-surfing, exploiting system's features in a quiz such as repeated guessing, working carelessly and using the system in ways unrelated to the stated work. It has been pointed out that boredom and confusion precede such behaviors although such computer-based learning systems are seen to be quite engaging in general and are useful when the number of students in a class is large.…”