Abstract
An important question for teachers and developers of instructional software is how much guidance or assistance should be provided to help students learn. This question has been framed within the field of educational technology as the ‘assistance dilemma’ and has been the subject of a variety of studies. In the study reported in this paper, we explore the learning benefits of four types of computer-based instructional materials, which span from highly assistive (worked examples) to no assistance (conventional problems to solve), with support levels in between these two extremes (tutored problems to solve, erroneous examples). In this never-before conducted comparison of the four instructional materials, we found that worked examples are the most efficient instructional material in terms of time and mental effort spent on the intervention problems, but we did not find that the materials differentially benefitted learners of high and low prior knowledge levels. We conjecture why this somewhat surprising result was found and propose a follow-up study to investigate this issue.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Koedinger, K.R., Aleven, V.: Exploring the assistance dilemma in experiments with cognitive tutors. Educational Psychology Review 19, 239–264 (2007)
Atkinson, R.K., Derry, S.J., Renkl, A., Wortham, D.: Learning from examples: Instructional principles from the worked examples research. Review of Ed R’ch 70, 181–214 (2000)
McLaren, B.M., Lim, S., Koedinger, K.R.: When and how often should worked examples be given to students? New results and a summary of the current state of research. In: Love, B.C., McRae, K., Sloutsky, V.M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cog. Sci. Society, pp. 2176–2181. Cognitive Science Society, Austin (2008)
Sweller, J., Van Merriënboer, J.J.G., Paas, F.: Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review 10, 251–295 (1998)
Chi, M.T.H., Bassok, M., Lewis, M.W., Reimann, P., Glaser, R.: Self-explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to solve problems. CogSci. 13, 145–182 (1989)
Paas, F.: Training strategies for attaining transfer of problem-solving skill in statistics: A cognitive load approach. Journal of Educational Psychology 84, 429–434 (1992)
Kalyuga, S., Chandler, P., Tuovinen, J., Sweller, J.: When problem solving is superior to studying worked examples. Journal of Educational Psychology 93, 579–588 (2001)
VanLehn, K.: The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems and other tutoring systems. Educational Psychologist 46(4), 197–221 (2011)
Graesser, A.C., Chipman, P., Haynes, B.C., Olney, A.: AutoTutor: An intelligent tutoring system with mixed-initiative dialogue. IEEE Transactions in Ed. 48, 612–618 (2005)
Ritter, S., Anderson, J.R., Koedinger, K., Corbett, A.: Cognitive Tutor: Applied research in mathematics education. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 14, 249–255 (2007)
Salden, R., Koedinger, K.R., Renkl, A., Aleven, V., McLaren, B.: Accounting for beneficial effects of worked examples in tutored problem solving. Ed. Psy. Rev. 22(4), 379–392 (2010)
Durkin, K., Rittle-Johnson, B.: The effectiveness of using incorrect examples to support learning about decimal magnitude. Learning and Instruction 22, 206–214 (2012)
Grosse, C.S., Renkl, A.: Finding and fixing errors in worked examples: Can this foster learning outcomes? Learning and Instruction 17, 612–634 (2007)
McLaren, B.M., et al.: To err is human, to explain and correct is divine: A study of interactive erroneous examples with middle school math students. In: Ravenscroft, A., Lindstaedt, S., Kloos, C.D., Hernández-Leo, D. (eds.) EC-TEL 2012. LNCS, vol. 7563, pp. 222–235. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
McLaren, B.M., DeLeeuw, K.E., Mayer, R.E.: Polite web-based intelligent tutors: Can they improve learning in classrooms? Computers & Education 56(3), 574–584 (2011)
Van Gog, T., Paas, F., Van Merriënboer, J.J.G.: Effects of process-oriented worked examples on troubleshooting transfer performance. Learning and Instruction 16, 154–164 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
McLaren, B.M., van Gog, T., Ganoe, C., Yaron, D., Karabinos, M. (2014). Exploring the Assistance Dilemma: Comparing Instructional Support in Examples and Problems. In: Trausan-Matu, S., Boyer, K.E., Crosby, M., Panourgia, K. (eds) Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ITS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8474. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07221-0_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07221-0_44
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07220-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07221-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)