Understanding Wheel Spinning in the Context of Affective Factors

The notion of wheel spinning, students getting stuck in the mastery learning cycle of an ITS without mastering the skill, is an emerging issue. Although wheel spinning has been analyzed, there has been little work in understanding what factors underlie it, and whether it occurs in cultural contexts outside that of the United States. This work analyzes data from 116 students in an urban setting in the Philippines. We found that Filipino students using the Scatterplot Tutor exhibited wheel spinning behaviors. We explore the impact of an intervention, Scooter the Tutor, on wheel spinning behavior and did not find that it had any effect. We also analyzed data from quantitative field observations, and found that wheel spinning is negatively correlated with flow, positively correlated with confusion, but not correlated with boredom. This result suggests that the problem of wheel spinning is primarily cognitive in nature, .and not related to student motivation. However, wheel spinning is positively correlated with gaming the system, so those constructs seem to be related.