Web-Based Evaluations Showing Differential Learning for Tutorial Strategies Employed by the Ms. Lindquist Tutor

Abstract

In a previous study, Heffernan and Koedinger [6] reported upon the Ms. Lindquist tutoring system that uses dialog and Heffernan conducted a web-based evaluation [7]. The previous evaluation considered students coming from three separate teachers and analyzed the individual learning gains based on the number of problems completed depending on the tutoring strategy provided. This paper examines a set of new web-based experiments. One set of experiments is targeted at determining if a differential learning gain exists between two of the tutoring strategies provided. Another set of experiments is used to determine if student motivation is dependent on the tutoring strategy. We replicate some findings from [7] with regard to the learning and motivation benefits of Ms Lindquist’s intelligent tutorial dialog. These experiments related to learning report on over 1,000 participants contributing at most 20 minutes each, for a grand total of over 200+ combined student hours.