D 2026

Measuring the Impact of Student Gaming Behaviors on Learner Modeling

LIU, Qinyi; Lin LI; Valdemar ŠVÁBENSKÝ; Conrad BORCHERS; Mohammad KHALIL et al.

Basic information

Original name

Measuring the Impact of Student Gaming Behaviors on Learner Modeling

Authors

LIU, Qinyi; Lin LI; Valdemar ŠVÁBENSKÝ; Conrad BORCHERS and Mohammad KHALIL

Edition

New York, NY, USA, Proceedings of the 16th Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK '26), 11 pp. 2026

Publisher

ACM

Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Proceedings paper

Country of publisher

United States of America

Confidentiality degree

is not subject to a state or trade secret

Publication form

electronic version available online

References:

URL, URL

Marked to be transferred to RIV

No

Organization

Fakulta informatiky – Repository – Repository

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/3785022.3785036

Keywords in English

Adaptive Learning System; Knowledge Tracing; Data Poisoning Attacks; Adversarial Machine Learning; Gaming the System

Links

GN25-15839I, research and development project.
Changed: 16/1/2026 00:51, RNDr. Daniel Jakubík

Abstract

In the original language

The expansion of large-scale online education platforms has yielded vast amounts of student interaction data for knowledge tracing (KT). KT models estimate students’ concept mastery from interaction data, but the models' performance is sensitive to input data quality. Gaming behaviors, such as excessive hint use, may misrepresent students’ knowledge and undermine model reliability. However, systematic investigations of how different types of gaming behaviors affect KT remain scarce, and existing studies rely on costly manual analysis that does not capture behavioral diversity. In this study, we conceptualize gaming behaviors as a form of data poisoning, defined as the deliberate submission of incorrect or misleading interaction data to corrupt a model’s learning process. We design Data Poisoning Attacks (DPA) to simulate diverse gaming patterns and systematically evaluate their impact on KT model performance. Moreover, drawing on advances in DPA detection, we explore unsupervised approaches to enhance the generalizability of gaming behavior detection. We find that KT models performance tend to decrease especially for random guess behaviors. Our findings provide insights into the vulnerabilities of KT models and highlight the potential of adversarial methods for improving the robustness of learning analytics systems.
Displayed: 2/5/2026 21:25