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

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 restrain themselves from requesting help, i.e., keep levels of help support at a minimum, and self-fading behavior, in which students 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 discussed with the assistance dilemma problem, generally occurring in instruction by intelligent tutoring systems.