Enhancing Stealth Assessment in Collaborative Game-Based Learning with Multi-task Learning

Collaborative game-based learning environments offer the promise of combining the strengths of computer-supported collaborative learning and game-based learning to enable students to work collectively towards achieving problem-solving goals in engaging storyworlds. Group chat plays an important role in such environments, enabling students to communicate with team members while exploring the learning environment and collaborating on problem solving. However, students may engage in chat behavior that negatively affects learning. To help address this problem, we introduce a multidimensional stealth assessment model for jointly predicting students’ out-of-domain contributions to group chat as well as their learning outcomes with multi-task learning. Results from evaluating the model indicate that multi-task learning, which simultaneously performs the multidimensional stealth assessment, utilizing predictive features extracted from in-game actions and group chat data outperforms single-task variants and suggest that multi-task learning can effectively support stealth assessment in collaborative game-based learning environments.