Heuristic Trees as a Digital Tool to Foster Compression and Decompression in Problem-Solving

Abstract

This design-based study addresses the issue of how to digitally support students’ problem-solving by providing heuristics, in the absence of the teacher. The problem is that, so far, digital tutoring systems lack the ability to diagnose students’ needs in open problem situations. Our approach is based on students’ ability to self-diagnose and find help. To this purpose, we introduce a new type of digital, interactive, help-seeking tool called a heuristic tree. Students’ use of this tool is supported by a help-seeking flowchart. The design of heuristic trees is based on our reinterpretation of the notion of heuristic in terms of terms of compression. Our research question is: How do heuristic trees and the help-seeking flowchart influence students’ problem-solving behaviour? This question was studied in the context of a number theory course for in-service mathematics teachers. During five weeks, fifty students worked on fifty-five problems supported by heuristic trees. Our data consists of video observations of two small groups of students, a teacher log, interviews with these two groups, and a survey filled in by twenty-three students. The main results are that the support by heuristic trees and the help-seeking flowchart allows students to work in the absence of a teacher and to engage strongly with problems, maintaining ownership of the solution methods. Moreover, as intended by the tree structure, students learned to focus not just on the small steps of the solutions, but also on the general heuristic techniques, theorems, and concepts that should be learned in the process of finding those solutions.