Abstract
An earlier study using sequences of online learning modules found that a significant fraction of undergraduate students were unable to solve similar new problems after learning from an online problem solving tutorial. The current study examines the effectiveness of two methods to improve students' subsequent problem solving performance. First, an module designed to help students develop proficiency in relevant basic skills was added prior to the tutorial. We found that students' performance on subsequent modules improved significantly over the previous year, and in one of the two sequences we found evidence to support that the improvement was due to the addition of the on-ramp module rather than other irrelevant factors. Second, a new transfer module was added after the tutorial and before the final quiz module in which half of the students were given a compare-contrast task and the other half were asked to answer tutorial-style scaffolding questions. On the subsequent quiz module, we did not find significant performance differences between the two conditions, nor did students' performance significantly improve over the previous year. The study demonstrated that mastery-style online homework can serve as an efficient and flexible method for evaluating the effectiveness of new instructional designs.
Highlights
Studies in both general human problem solving and problem solving in physics have long shown that it is difficult for novices to transfer the understanding and skills learned in one problem context to a different, new context [1,2,3]
The study was conducted using online learning modules (OLMs) [5, 15, 16] implemented on the Obojobo platform [17] developed by the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida (UCF)
Considering that some students may not have fully engaged with the instructional component (IC) of module 4, we conducted the same comparison among students who spent a “sufficient” amount of time studying the IC of module 4
Summary
Studies in both general human problem solving and problem solving in physics have long shown that it is difficult for novices to transfer the understanding and skills learned in one problem context to a different, new context [1,2,3]. We tested two strategies for improving student performance on subsequent similar problems following an online tutorial. Research in both learning science [6,7,8] and physics education [9, 10] have shown that explicitly comparing and contrasting multiple examples can be more effective for understanding the common deep structure of the problems compared to studying isolated examples in sequence. The theory predicts that explicitly asking students to compare a new problem to a previously solved similar problem results in better performance on subsequent transfer tasks than only asking students to study features of the new problem
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