Pavlik - Difficulty and Strategy

Background

Currently the FaCT (Fact and Concept Training System) is deployed in the Chinese Learnlab and has been used in French and ESL Learnlabs for prior work. The FaCT system allows both randomized and adaptive model based scheduling of single step practice items either in the lab or integrated into a class. In past in vivo studies, some students do not seem to be motivated to complete more than the minimum work with the adaptive system to learn vocabulary, in contrast to lab studies that show that the system was is effective and might therefore be expected to lead to higher persistence in students. There are several motivational and metacognitive factors that could be responsible for the relatively low usage and/or poor performance of some students. 1. Students find the tutor to be too difficult or too easy 2. Students do not perceive a value to the practice 3. Students do not expect to do well 4. Students do not use appropriate strategies in the tutor We plan to conduct in-vivo experiments to determine how interventions to modify these factors may result in improvements in both immediate learning, acceleration of future learning and longer-term transfer performance to in class measures. A current pilot study (with about 80 students participating) is looking at the relationship between various aspects of performance and aspects of self-regulation, strategy use, and motivation, as measured by Pintrich’s Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ; (Pintrich & de Groot, 1990). Two months after taking the MSLQ students were assigned the FaCT system vocabulary practice for Lesson 17 of their curriculum for 30 minutes. Two weeks following this practice there was a post practice survey that asked questions about perceived difficulty, self-regulation and strategies, and perceived value. While the results have not been fully analyzed, in Experiment 1 we found some suggestive relationships between the measures we observed. Specifically, the MSLQ anxiety factor predicted higher reported difficulty (r=.42) on the post practice questionnaire (difficulty reports also correlated negatively (-.4) with performance during practice). Also, some individual post practice difficulty items marginally correlated negatively with amount of time spend practicing. Another suggestive result was that MSLQ anxiety was correlated (.31) with rote type strategic behavior questions on the MSLQ while rote strategic behaviors were also correlated with post practice difficulty (.29). Further analysis will focus on how specific student behaviors (e.g. the amount of practice trials that end with timeout as compared to a guess) is associated with MSLQ responses, post survey responses, or learning and performance measures.