When students are solving problems they often turn to examples when they need assistance. Examples are helpful because they illustrate how a problem can be solved. However, when examples are very similar to the problems, students default to copying the example solutions, which hinders learning. To address this, prior work has investigated the effect of manipulating problem–example similarity, showing that learning can be increased by reducing the assistance provided by examples. We contribute to this literature by comparing two types of assistance mechanisms in the context of problem-solving activities: (1) fade-out assistance, where initially the examples are similar to the problems but over time the problem–example similarity is reduced, and (2) fade-in assistance where the opposite is the case (initially the problem–example pairs have reduced similarity but the similarity is increased as more problems are solved). The fade-in assistance condition produced significantly higher learning gains than the fade-out condition and based on eye-tracking data, the fade-in group spent longer attending to the problem, particularly early on in the problem-solving session. Our conjecture that the fade-in group was engaged in more autonomous problem solving instead of copying was confirmed by exploratory analysis on a subset of the data showing that copying was initially reduced in the fade-in condition, as compared to high in the fade-out condition. Overall, our results highlight that initially struggling in a problem-solving activity results in more learning.

当学生解决问题时，他们经常在需要帮助时会举一些例子。示例很有用，因为它们说明了如何解决问题。但是，当示例与问题非常相似时，学生会默认复制示例解决方案，这会妨碍学习。为了解决这个问题，以前的工作已经研究了处理问题的效果-示例相似性，表明可以通过减少示例提供的帮助来增加学习。我们在解决问题的活动中比较两种类型的援助机制有助于这一文献：（1）淡出-淘汰援助，其中最初的例子类似，但随着时间的推移问题的例子相似性降低的问题， （2）淡化-在相反情况下的帮助中（最初，问题－示例对减少了相似度，但是随着更多问题的解决，相似度增加了）。淡入淡出辅助条件比淡入淡出条件产生的学习收益要高得多，并且基于眼动数据，淡入淡出小组花了更长的时间来解决问题，尤其是在解决问题的早期。我们的推测是，通过对一部分数据进行探索性分析，证实了淡入组从事的是更自主的问题解决而非复制，这表明在淡入条件下复制最初被减少了，而淡入度较高。情况不佳。总体而言，我们的结果突出表明，最初在解决问题的活动中苦苦挣扎会带来更多学习。