As a first step toward automatic feedback based on students' strategies for solving histogram tasks we investigated how strategy recognition can be automated based on students' gazes. A previous study showed how students' task-specific strategies can be inferred from their gazes. The research question addressed in the present article is how data…

This case study used a design-based research approach to examine the development and evaluation of an online homework system to support learning and problem-solving in a high school physics course. Emergent themes included challenges of building the system, strengths and weaknesses of it, and the benefits to students. While the system largely met…

Mathematical formulae are information objects that can be entered in a computer, visualized, and evaluated. Thus, by the majority of (mostly occasional) users it is also expected that they are transferable through the simple copy-paste procedure. This transfer is particularly interesting when users are involved in tasks that span different…

Math homework is transforming at a rapid rate with the continuous advances in educational technology. Computer-based homework, in particular, is gaining popularity across a range of schools, with little empirical evidence on how to optimize student learning. In the current study, middle school students (N = 143) solved a set of challenging…

This article describes a grading approach that encourages students to employ particular problem-solving skills. Some strengths of this method, called "process-based grading," are that it is easy to implement, requires minimal time to grade, and can be used in conjunction with either an online homework delivery system or paper-based homework.

For more than 2 years, Scratch programming has been taught in Taiwanese elementary schools. However, past studies have shown that it is difficult to find appropriate learning methods or tools to boost students' Scratch programming performance. This inability to readily identify tutoring tools has become one of the primary challenges addressed in…

In Taiwan elementary schools, Scratch programming has been taught for more than four years. Previous studies have shown that personal annotations is a useful learning method that improve learning performance. An annotation-based Scratch programming (ASP) system provides for the creation, share, and review of annotations and homework solutions in…

Students taking introductory physics are rarely exposed to computational modeling. In a one-semester large lecture introductory calculus-based mechanics course at Georgia Tech, students learned to solve physics problems using the VPython programming environment. During the term, 1357 students in this course solved a suite of 14 computational…

To improve students' retention rates in general chemistry, online homework was introduced into our curriculum. Replacing quizzes directly by online homework significantly improved (p less than 0.0005) success rates in second-term general chemistry. Attitudinal Likert survey results indicate that the majority of students completed the online…

In this article, the author describes the pedagogical benefits of giving students individually unique homework exercises from an exercise template. Evidence from a test of this approach shows statistically significant improvements in subsequent exam performance by students receiving unique problems compared with students who received traditional…

Physics teachers are most effective when their students are active learners who think and participate in every class. This extends beyond the classroom too: ideally, students would tackle challenging questions and exercises after every class--not just before the exam or the night before the weekly homework is due. Just-in-Time-Teaching was…

This article analyzes the findings from an 18-section experiment studying the effect of homework-completion tutoring on community college students' remedial mathematics performance. The experiment involved 529 students registered for two remedial math courses: math skills and algebra. For each course, the experiment studied nine sections: three…

Intelligent tutors have become increasingly accurate at detecting whether a student knows a skill, or knowledge component (KC), at a given time. However, current student models do not tell us exactly at which point a KC is learned. In this paper, we present a machine-learned model that assesses the probability that a student learned a KC at a…

This study compared learning for fifth grade students in two math homework conditions. The paper-and-pencil condition represented traditional homework, with review of problems in class the following day. The Web-based homework condition provided immediate feedback in the form of hints on demand and step-by-step scaffolding. We analyzed the results…

We investigate short-term learning from hints and feedback in a Web-based physics tutoring system. Both the skill of students and the difficulty and discrimination of items were determined by applying item response theory (IRT) to the first answers of students who are working on for-credit homework items in an introductory Newtonian physics…