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Boosting engagement with educational software has been promoted as a means of improving student performance. Various engagement factors have been explored, including choice, personalization, badges, bonuses, and competition. We examine two promising and relatively understudied manipulations from the realm of gambling: the nearwin effect and anticipation. The near-win effect occurs when an individual comes close to achieving a goal, e.g., getting two cherries and a lemon in a slot machine. Anticipation refers to the build-up of suspense as an outcome is revealed, e.g., revealing cherry-cherry-lemon in that order drives expectations of winning more than revealing lemon-cherrycherry. Gambling psychologists have long studied how near-wins affect engagement in pure-chance games but it is difficult to do the same in an educational context where outcomes are based on skill. In this paper, we manipulate the display of outcomes in a manner that allows us to introduce artificial near-wins largely independent of a student’s performance. In a study involving thousands of students using an online math tutor, we examine how this manipulation affects a behavioral measure of engagement—whether or not a student repeats a lesson. We find a near-win effect on engagement when the ‘win’ indicates to the student that they have attained critical competence on a lesson—the competence that allows them to continue to the next lesson. Nonetheless, when we experimentally induce near wins in a randomized controlled trial, we do not obtain a reliable effect of the near win. We discuss this mismatch of results in terms of the role of anticipation on making near wins effective. We conclude by describing manipulations that might increase the effect of near wins on engagement.
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This content will become publicly available on August 2, 2025
Testing Randomness by Matching Pennies
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they display different sides, then Bob wins Alice's penny. To avoid giving the opponent a chance to win, both players seem to have nothing else to do but to randomly play heads and tails with equal frequencies. However, while not losing in this game is easy, not missing an opportunity to win is not. Randomizing your own moves can be made easy. Recognizing when the opponent's moves are not random can be arbitrarily hard. The notion of randomness is central in game theory, but it is usually taken for granted. The notion of outsmarting is not central in game theory, but it is central in the practice of gaming. We pursue the idea that these two notions can be usefully viewed as two sides of the same coin. The resulting analysis suggests that the methods for strategizing in gaming and security, and for randomizing in computation, can be leveraged against each other. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 03D32,91A26,91A26, 68Q32.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1662487
- PAR ID:
- 10566753
- Publisher / Repository:
- Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sarajevo Journal of Mathematics
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1840-0655
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 25 to 45
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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