Abstract
We present a study that examines the effects of guidance on learning about addressing ill-defined problems in undergraduate biology education. Two groups of college students used an online laboratory named VERA to learn about ill-defined ecological phenomena. While one group received guidance, such as giving the learners a specific problem and instruction on problem-solving methods, the other group received minimal guidance. The results indicate that, while performance in a problem-solving task was not different between groups receiving more vs. minimal guidance, the group that received minimal guidance adopted a more exploratory strategy and generated more interesting models of the given phenomena in a problem-solving task.
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Acknowledgement
This research was supported by US NSF grant #1636848. We thank members of the VERA project, especially Spencer Rugaber, Luke Eglington, and Stephen Buckley. We also thank the TAs and the students in the biology lab. This research was conducted in accordance with IRB protocol #H18258.
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An, S., Weigel, E., Goel, A.K. (2022). Effects of Guidance on Learning About Ill-defined Problems. In: Crossley, S., Popescu, E. (eds) Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ITS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13284. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09680-8_28
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