Abstract
SummaryWorked‐examples have been established as an effective instructional format in problem‐solving practices. However, less is known about variations in the use of worked examples across individuals at different stages in their learning process in student‐centred learning contexts. This study investigates different profiles of students' learning behaviours based on clustering learning dispositions, prior knowledge, and the choice of feedback strategies in a naturalistic setting. The study was conducted on 1,072 students over an 8‐week long introductory mathematics course in a blended instructional format. While practising exercises in a digital learning environment, students can opt for tutored problem solving, untutored problem solving, or call worked examples. The results indicated six distinct profiles of learners regarding their feedback preferences in different learning phases. Finally, we investigated antecedents and consequences of these profiles and investigated the adequacy of used feedback strategies concerning ‘help‐abuse’. This research indicates that the use of instructional scaffolds as worked‐examples or hints and the efficiency of that use differs from student to student, making the attempt to find patterns at an overall level a hazardous endeavour.
Highlights
The type of research we propose is closely linked with the development sketched above: investigating the use of worked examples, tutored, and untutored problem solving in an authentic learning context
When looking at how students self-regulated learning over a longer period of time, we found temporal variances in the use of worked examples over different phases of the study, which subsequently influenced academic performance (Rienties et al, 2019)
The role of the individual difference characteristics is much broader: some act as consequences of student learning behaviours, some act as antecedents of the learning behaviours, and a third group is taken as defining the student profiles, together with learning behaviour indicators. In all of these cases, we aim to investigate what the relationship is between the use of worked examples and hints and the measured facets of individual differences
Summary
Worked-examples have been established as an effective instructional format in problem-solving practices. This study investigates different profiles of students' learning behaviours based on clustering learning dispositions, prior knowledge, and the choice of feedback strategies in a naturalistic setting. While practising exercises in a digital learning environment, students can opt for tutored problem solving, untutored problem solving, or call worked examples. The results indicated six distinct profiles of learners regarding their feedback preferences in different learning phases. This research indicates that the use of instructional scaffolds as worked-examples or hints and the efficiency of that use differs from student to student, making the attempt to find patterns at an overall level a hazardous endeavour. KEYWORDS blended learning, dispositional learning analytics, multi-modal data, tutored problem-solving, untutored problem-solving, worked examples
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