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Assistance that fades in improves learning better than assistance that fades out

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. An earlier version of a subset of this work was presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society and appears in the online proceedings as a 6-page paper (Jennings and Muldner 2018).

  2. The values are less than total time spent in a given condition because this analysis (i) does not include time spent looking at other areas, like the virtual keyboard and (ii) and the eye tracker was not able to capture all fixations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant (#1507). We are grateful to Jo-Anne LeFevre for sharing her eye tracking equipment with us.

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  1. Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, 2205 Duton Tower, 1125 Colonel By Dr, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada

    Jay Jennings & Kasia Muldner

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  1. Jay Jennings
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Correspondence to Kasia Muldner.

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Jennings, J., Muldner, K. Assistance that fades in improves learning better than assistance that fades out. Instr Sci 48, 371–394 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-020-09520-7

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