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Title: A Step-Based Tutoring System to Teach Underachieving Students How to Construct Algebraic Models
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 representedby 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).  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1840051
PAR ID:
10429908
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
ISSN:
1560-4292
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1-33
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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