The Impact of Granularity on the Effectiveness of Students' Pedagogical Decisions

In this study we explored the impact of student versus tutor pedagogical decision-making on learning. More specifically, we examined what would happen if we let students decide how to handle the next task: to view it as a worked example or to solve it as a problem solving. We examined this impact at two levels of task granularity: problem vs. step. This 2× 2 study was conducted on an existing Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) called Pyrenees. 279 students were randomly assigned to four conditions and the domain content and required steps were strictly controlled to be equivalent across four conditions: all students used the same system, followed the same general procedure, studied the same training materials, and worked through the same training problems. The only substantive differences among the four conditions were decision agency {Student vs. Tutor} and granularity {Problem vs. Step}. That is: who decided to present an example or to solve a problem; and was the decision made problem-by-problem or step-by-step? Our results showed that there was a significant interaction effect between decision agency and granularity on student learning and a significant main effect of granularity on time on training. That is, step level decisions can be more effective than problem level decisions but the students were more likely to make effective pedagogical decisions at problem level than step level. In general, on both problem and step levels, the students were significantly more likely to decide to do problem solving rather than study it as a worked example.