TY - JOUR
T1 - A Step-Based Tutoring System to Teach Underachieving Students How to Construct Algebraic Models
AU - VanLehn, Kurt
AU - Milner, Fabio
AU - Banerjee, Chandrani
AU - Wetzel, Jon
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NSF 1628782, NSF 1840051 and The Diane and Gary Tooker Chair for Effective Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - An algebraic model uses a set of algebraic equations to describe a situation. Constructing such models is a fundamental skill, but many students still lack the skill, even after taking several algebra courses in high school and college. For such students, we developed instruction that taught students to decompose the to-be-modelled situation into schema applications, where a schema represents a simple relationship such as distance-rate-time or part-whole. However, when a model consists of multiple schema applications, it needs some connection among them, usually represented by letting the same variable appear in the slots of two or more schemas. Students in our studies seemed to have more trouble identifying connections among schema applications than identifying the schema applications themselves. We developed several tutoring systems and evaluated them in university classes. One of them, a step-based tutoring system called OMRaaT (One Mathematical Relationship at a Time), was both reliably superior (p = 0.02, d = 0.67) to baseline and markedly superior (p < 0.001, d = 0.84) to an answer-based tutoring system using only commercially available software (MATLAB Grader).
AB - An algebraic model uses a set of algebraic equations to describe a situation. Constructing such models is a fundamental skill, but many students still lack the skill, even after taking several algebra courses in high school and college. For such students, we developed instruction that taught students to decompose the to-be-modelled situation into schema applications, where a schema represents a simple relationship such as distance-rate-time or part-whole. However, when a model consists of multiple schema applications, it needs some connection among them, usually represented by letting the same variable appear in the slots of two or more schemas. Students in our studies seemed to have more trouble identifying connections among schema applications than identifying the schema applications themselves. We developed several tutoring systems and evaluated them in university classes. One of them, a step-based tutoring system called OMRaaT (One Mathematical Relationship at a Time), was both reliably superior (p = 0.02, d = 0.67) to baseline and markedly superior (p < 0.001, d = 0.84) to an answer-based tutoring system using only commercially available software (MATLAB Grader).
KW - Algebra story problem solving
KW - Algebra word problem solving
KW - Algebraic model construction
KW - Intelligent tutoring system
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U2 - 10.1007/s40593-023-00328-3
DO - 10.1007/s40593-023-00328-3
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85147110514
SN - 1560-4292
JO - International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
JF - International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
ER -