How do students’ learning behaviors evolve in Scaffolded Open-Ended Learning Environments?

Metacognition and self-regulation are important components for developing effective learning in the classroom and beyond, but novice learners often lack these skills. Betty’s Brain, an open-ended computer-based learning environment, helps students develop metacognitive strategies as they learn science topics. In order to better understand and improve the effect of adaptive scaffolding on students’ cognitive and metacognitive skills, we investigate students’ activities in Betty’s Brain from a study comparing different forms of adaptive scaffolding. We measure students’ cognitive and metacognitive processes from students’ action sequences by (i) interpreting and characterizing behavior patterns using a cognitive/metacognitive model of the task, (ii) mapping students’ frequently observed cognitive and metacognitive process patterns back into their overall activity sequences and measuring their effectiveness, and (iii) employing a binning method with clustering and visualization techniques to characterize the temporal evolution of these processes. Our experimental studies illustrate that the effectiveness and temporal changes in students’ behaviors were generally consistent with the scaffolding provided, suggesting that these metacognitive strategies can be taught to middle school students in computer-based learning environments.