Abstract
The support the tutor provides for a student is expected to fade over time as the student makes progress towards mastery of the learning objectives. One way in which the tutor can fade support is to prompt or elicit a next step that requires the student to fill in some intermediate actions or reasoning on her own. But what should the tutor do if the student is unable to complete such a step? In human-human tutoring interactions, a tutor may remediate by explicitly covering the missing intermediate steps with the student and in some contexts this behavior correlates with learning. But if there are multiple intermediate steps that need to be made explicit, the tutor could focus the student’s attention on the last successful step and then move forward through the intermediate steps (forward reasoning) or the tutor could focus the student’s attention on the intermediate step just before the failed step and move backward through the intermediate steps (backward reasoning). In this paper we explore when the forward strategy or backward strategy may be beneficial for remediation. We also compare the two faded support+remediation strategies to a control in which support is never faded and found that faded support was not detrimental to student learning outcomes when the two remediation strategies were available and it took significantly less time on task to achieve similar learning gains when starting the tutor-student interaction with faded support.
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- 1.
There were at least two reflection questions per problem and at most three depending on the problem.
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gain = (PosttestScore-PretestScore)/#TestItems.
- 3.
While it is possible that students may have found these two problems to be more difficult than earlier ones, a one-way ANOVA with the number of problems as the independent variable and the number of remediations needed as the dependent variable showed no statistically significant difference \(F(1,156)=1.9, p=.166\) between the two problems (\(M=.204, SD=.132\)) and all of the problems (\(M=.178, SD=.106\)).
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Acknowledgment
We thank Dennis Lusetich, Svetlana Romanova, Catherine Stainton, Sarah Birmingham and Scott Silliman. This research was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A130441 to the University of Pittsburgh. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
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Jordan, P., Albacete, P., Katz, S. (2018). A Comparison of Tutoring Strategies for Recovering from a Failed Attempt During Faded Support. In: Penstein Rosé, C., et al. Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10947. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93843-1_16
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