Do Performance Goals Lead Students to Game the System?

Students approach the learning opportunity offered by intelligent tutoring systems with a variety of goals and attitudes. These goals and attitudes can substantially affect students’ behavior within the tutor, and how much the student learns. One behavior that has been found to be associated with poorer learning is gaming the system, where a student attempts to complete problems and advance through an educational task by systematically taking advantage of properties and regularities in the system used to complete that task. It has been hypothesized that students game the system because of performance goals. In this paper, however, we find that the frequency of gaming the system does not correlate to a known measure of performance goals; instead, gaming is correlated to disliking computers and the tutor. Performance goals, by contrast, are shown to be associated with working slowly and avoiding errors, and are found to not be correlated to differences in learning outcomes.