Leena Razzaq and Neil T. Heffernan Venu Babu Thati Hints: Is It Better to Give or Wait to Be Asked? 1

Outline Motivation Tutoring System(ASSISTment system) Methodology with example Result and conclusion Future work 2

Motivation 3 Hints-on-demand and proactive hints

Motivation 4 Proactive hints I made errors

Motivation 5 Hints on demand I want a hint

Motivation 6 Un productive help seekers I am confused

ASSISTment system 7 Mission To improve education through the scientific research while not compromising on student learning time Vision In classrooms every where, continuously improve teaching and learning through the use of validated educational research finding and applied technology

The ASSISTment System 8 Assist students for the MCAS test Used by middle and high-school teachers More then 3000 students and 50 teachers use the system Web based version

ASSITment system example 9 Teachers receive immediate feedback on the students work

Methodology 10 Here hints plays a major role Each hint sequence ends with a bottom-out hint Hints are pertinent to the task Mostly hint sequence of 3-5 hints

Experiment Design 11 There were two conditions in this case 1. Hints on demand 2. Proactive hints In this experiment students need to work on two topics 1. Symbolization(for both conditions) 2. Slope/intercept(for both conditions)

Participants male and 32 female about the age 12-14

Hints-on-demand Procedure 13

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Proactive hints procedure 15

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MCAS test 18 Here students were presented with 4 problems in each topic. First they will conduct pretest and post-test with 4 problems Gain from pre test to post-test was used to measure the learning ability

Symbolization vs slope/intercept 19 From the test the average gain for symbolization problem set was 12% Gain for the slope/intercept problem set was 4% 61 students completed the both conditions After finishing the MCAS test the median score on the test was 75%

Gain values 20 MCAS scores are used to classify students as 1. High math ability 2. Low math ability

Students ability 21 From the test the repeated measures showed that students learned significantly more from hints on demand Approximately students with high math ability ask for (mean = 5.5 hints) very few hints Students with low math ability ask for (mean = 11 hints) large no. of hints

Overall Test Result 22 The final result of the analysis with respect to the two conditions

Resultant graph 23

Resultant graph 24

Conclusion 25 We have seen the test for comparing the hint on demand to proactive hint in tutoring system We found that middle school students working better with hints on demand then proactive hints with the effect size of 0.35 Interestingly students who tended to ask more hints hints on demand is better Who ask very few doubts it does not make any difference two conditions

Future work 26 Students who participated in the test are familiar with the hints on demand Proactive hints are unfamiliar and confusing the students Lack of time to know clearly about proactive hints For future experiment they decided to do it for a long time with more no. of students

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