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Main Authors: Schütt, Anan, Huber, Tobias, Nasir, Jauwairia, Conati, Cristina, André, Elisabeth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01934
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author Schütt, Anan
Huber, Tobias
Nasir, Jauwairia
Conati, Cristina
André, Elisabeth
author_facet Schütt, Anan
Huber, Tobias
Nasir, Jauwairia
Conati, Cristina
André, Elisabeth
contents Difficulty adjustment in practice exercises has been shown to be beneficial for learning. However, previous research has mostly investigated close-ended tasks, which do not offer the students multiple ways to reach a valid solution. Contrary to this, in order to learn in an open-ended learning task, students need to effectively explore the solution space as there are multiple ways to reach a solution. For this reason, the effects of difficulty adjustment could be different for open-ended tasks. To investigate this, as our first contribution, we compare different methods of difficulty adjustment in a user study conducted with 86 participants. Furthermore, as the practice behavior of the students is expected to influence how well the students learn, we additionally look at their practice behavior as a post-hoc analysis. Therefore, as a second contribution, we identify different types of practice behavior and how they link to students' learning outcomes and subjective evaluation measures as well as explore the influence the difficulty adjustment methods have on the practice behaviors. Our results suggest the usefulness of taking into account the practice behavior in addition to only using the practice performance to inform adaptive intervention and difficulty adjustment methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_01934
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does Difficulty even Matter? Investigating Difficulty Adjustment and Practice Behavior in an Open-Ended Learning Task
Schütt, Anan
Huber, Tobias
Nasir, Jauwairia
Conati, Cristina
André, Elisabeth
Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
Difficulty adjustment in practice exercises has been shown to be beneficial for learning. However, previous research has mostly investigated close-ended tasks, which do not offer the students multiple ways to reach a valid solution. Contrary to this, in order to learn in an open-ended learning task, students need to effectively explore the solution space as there are multiple ways to reach a solution. For this reason, the effects of difficulty adjustment could be different for open-ended tasks. To investigate this, as our first contribution, we compare different methods of difficulty adjustment in a user study conducted with 86 participants. Furthermore, as the practice behavior of the students is expected to influence how well the students learn, we additionally look at their practice behavior as a post-hoc analysis. Therefore, as a second contribution, we identify different types of practice behavior and how they link to students' learning outcomes and subjective evaluation measures as well as explore the influence the difficulty adjustment methods have on the practice behaviors. Our results suggest the usefulness of taking into account the practice behavior in addition to only using the practice performance to inform adaptive intervention and difficulty adjustment methods.
title Does Difficulty even Matter? Investigating Difficulty Adjustment and Practice Behavior in an Open-Ended Learning Task
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01934