The Impact of Instructional Intervention and Practice on Help-Seeking Strategies within an ITS
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Educational Data Mining
2015
Abstract
Within intelligent tutoring systems, instructional events are often embedded in the problem-solving process. As students encounter unfamiliar problems there are several actions they may take to solve it: they may explore the space by trying different actions in order to ‘discover’ the correct path or they can request a hint to get ‘direct instruction’ about how to proceed. In this paper we analyze experimental data from a tutoring system that provides two different kinds of hints: (1) interface specific hints that guide students attention to relevant portions of a worked example, supporting student discovery of next steps, and (2) procedural hints that directly tell students how to proceed. We adapted a method of sequence clustering to identify distinct hinting strategies across the two conditions. Using this method, we discovered three help-seeking strategies that change due to experimental condition and practice. We find that differences in strategy use between conditions are greatest for students that struggle to achieve mastery.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{tenison-edm-2015,
title = {The Impact of Instructional Intervention and Practice on Help-Seeking Strategies within an ITS},
author = {Tenison, Caitlin and MacLellan, Christopher J.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Educational Data Mining},
year = {2015},
}