In this paper, we explore the impact of two types of instructional
interventions, worked examples and problem solving, at
two levels of granularity: problems and steps. This study drew
on an existing Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for Probability
called Pyrenees and involved 266 students who were randomly
assigned to five conditions. All students experienced
the same procedure, studied the same training problems in the
same order, and used the same ITS. The conditions differed
only in how the training problems were presented. Our results
show that when the domain content and required steps are
strictly equivalent, different granularities of pedagogical decisions
can significantly impact students’ time on task. More
specifically, the fine-grained step level decisions can have a
stronger pedagogical impact than the problem-level ones.