Exploring Adaptive Strategies for Providing Learning Activities

Research shows that Worked Examples (WE) and Erroneous Examples (ErrEx) provide learning benefits, particularly when presented alternatively with problems to solve. We previously proposed an adaptive strategy for selecting WE, ErrEx, and Problem Solving (PS) adaptively based on the student's problem solving score and found that the adaptive strategy was beneficial for students in comparison to learning from a fixed sequence of alternating WE/PS pairs and ErrEx/PS pairs [1]. Students who received learning activities adaptively achieved the same learning outcomes as their peers in a fixed condition, but with fewer learning activities [2]. In this paper, we investigate a different adaptive strategy, which provides WEs and ErrExs to novices, and ErrEx and PS to advanced students. We found that the original adaptive strategy [2] is more effective than the new adaptive strategy. Furthermore, both novices and advanced students who learned with the original adaptive strategy demonstrated better performance on the post-test.