Web-Based Evaluations Showing both Cognitive and Motivational Benefits of the Ms. Lindquist Tutor

摘要

In a previous study, Heffernan and Koedinger reported upon the Ms. Lindquist tutoring system. The evaluation results reported were preliminary in that we showed that students learn more when they get to engage in a dialog, but we did not control for time-on-task so were not sure if it was worth the additional time a dialog takes. This paper reports the latest web-based experimental results. Results from three different classroom teachers having students use the Ms Lindquist system are reported. All showed that students using Ms Lindquist did fewer problems, as expected, but learned equally well (or better). We conclude that Ms Lindquist leads to a "Less is More" type of result in that students that are engaged in a dialog learn more from each problem they do, which might help to explain why students that were given an intelligent dialog were more motivated to persist in getting tutored (Experiment 1). We discuss the possible benefits of better dialog, as well as the implication of running experiments on the web.