Teachers Benefit From Looking at Common Wrong Answers in ASSISTments

• In Event: Learning From Our Students’ Mistakes: Using Information From Incorrect, Incomplete, and Inefficient Student Responses

Abstract

ASSISTmetns is an online tool often used for homework support that was just shown by SRI to come close to doubling student learning (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2332858416673968).

One important aspect of ASSISTments is helping teachers respond to common wrong answers as part of homework review. The author of the problems in ASSISTments can include feedback that will be provided to students as immediate feedback when the students make common errors to those problems. Without technology it is hard for a math teacher to know what common wrong answers students made in last night’s homework. ASSISTments makes it easy for teachers to see what those common wrong answers are. In the randomized controlled trial in the study by SRI mentioned earlier, one of the measures of fidelity of implementation was to confirm how teachers responded in class to common wrong answers.

We have a video from a study demonstrating the use of common wrong answers as a tool for homework review that we will show as part of the presentation for this symposium. This video can be found here: http://www.aboutus.assistments.org/homework-immediate-feedback---1-day-study.php.

Recently our focus on common wrong answers has moved from teacher intervention in class to the creation of common wrong answer feedback messages to be delivered right when a student makes the error. We will be comparing the effectiveness of different messages. While a lot of research activity (Jones & VanLehn, 1994), in this space looks at common wrong answers as misconceptions that need to be remediated, we think many common answer answers are not deep misconceptions, but are instead common slips that don't need serious "remediation," but nevertheless benefit from acknowledging them as common. This is consistent with Vanlehn & Siler et al.'s 's other work (1998) that for feedback to be helpful, students have to first make errors. Vanlehn argued that some types of knowledge are best learned if the student is first confronted with why an answer is wrong.

We will explain our ongoing work where we ask teachers and students to create feedback for common wrong answers. We will also share the work of classroom observations regarding teacher use of these strategies in the SRI study.

Jones, R. M., & VanLehn, K. (1994). Acquisition of children’s addition strategies: A model of impasse-free, knowledge-level learning. Machine Learning, 15 (1 & 2), 11-36. [1.7 MB PDF]

VanLehn, K., Siler, S., Murray, R. C., & Baggett, W. (1998). What makes a tutorial event effective? In M. A. Gernsbacher & S. Derry (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1084-1089). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Authors

• Neil T. Heffernan, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

• Cristina L. Heffernan, University of Pittsburgh

• Korinn S Ostrow, Worcester Polytechnic Institute