Promoting Effective Help-Seeking Behavior Through Declarative Instruction

The ability to use help-resources efficiently is an important skill in any learning environment, whether the student is in a traditional classroom or is using an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Nevertheless, studies have shown that students’ actual help-seeking behavior is far from being ideal (Mandl et al. 2000, Aleven et al. 2001a; 2001b, Ryan et al. 1998). In this study, we present an evaluation of one way of improving such behavior – by giving the students direct instruction about efficient help-seeking behavior. Two classrooms using the Geometry Cognitive Tutor (Anderson et al. 1995) participated in the study. The instruction to the HELP group, aimed to improve their help-seeking behavior, included a walk-through example. The CONTROL group received instruction with a similar walk-through but without the help-seeking content. In two subsequent weeks, the HELP group used the system’s hints much more frequently than the CONTROL group. Though in general the students showed to learn during the study, we didn’t observe a significant difference in the learning outcomes between the two groups. These results suggest that appropriate instruction can improve help-seeking behavior in ITS usage. Further formative evaluation should be performed in order to design better instruction on help-seeking and to understand its influence on learning outcomes. This approach is only one of several that will be combined in order to try to improve help seeking behavior.