Wheel-Spinning in a Game-Based Learning Environment for Physics

Wheel-Spinning Models in a Novice Programming Context

“…The problem of wheel-spinning had been studied within some educational software, for example, ScatterPlot Tutor (Beck & Rodrigo, 2014), Physics Playground (Palaoag et al, 2016), Cognitive Algebra Tutor, and ASSISTments (Beck & Gong, 2013;Gong & Beck, 2015;Gong et al, 2016;Wan & Beck, 2015). These past studies have successfully established that wheel-spinning occurred in these environments.…”

“…Persistence refers to the ability of a person to maintain a course of action, regardless of the person's feelings in achieving the task. While persistence is regarded as predictive of academic success, it is not always productive and desirable (Palaoag et al, 2016). Instead of achieving mastery by being persistent, student may encounter several failures and eventually get stuck.…”

“…They usually pertain to the effort exerted by the student, indicated by the number and sequence of attempts, and the extent to which the student succeeded. These include past performance of the students based on badges: bronze, silver, and gold (Palaoag et al, 2016), the performance on skills, the performance on the prerequisite skills (Wan & Beck, 2015), number of correct responses in a row, number of prior incorrect responses, and number of problems attempted without mastery (Gong & Beck, 2015).…”

“…Logistic regression classifier was used because of the dependent variables are categorical: wheelspinning and not wheel-spinning. Moreover, this method has been effectively used by past studies (Beck & Gong, 2013;Gong & Beck, 2015;Beck & Rodrigo, 2014;Gong et al, 2016;Palaoag et al, 2016;Wan & Beck, 2015) in building wheel-spinning models. All models were subjected to a k-fold student-level cross-validation where k was the number of students in the dataset.…”

“…Wheel-spinning refers to a failure to master a skill in a timely manner, despite effort (Beck & Gong, 2013;Gong & Beck, 2015). Students experience wheel-spinning due to a knowledge deficit (Beck & Rodrigo, 2014;Palaoag, Rodrigo, Andres, Andres, & Beck, 2016) and poor acquisition of prerequisite skills (Wan & Beck, 2015). Previous studies have examined data from several educational tutoring systems (Physics Playground, Palaoag et al, 2016;ScatterPlot Tutor, Beck & Rodrigo, 2014; Cognitive Algebra Tutor, (Beck & Gong, 2013;Gong & Beck, 2015); ASSISTments, (Beck & Gong, 2013;Gong & Beck, 2015); Gong et al, 2016;Wan & Beck, 2015) and meaningful gamification system (MGS; to be discussed later; Flores, Rodrigo, & Agapito, 2018) to study the wheel-spinning phenomenon.…”