Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we explored the impact of the decision agency(Student vs. Tutor) and granularity (Problem vs. Step) acrossstudents with different levels of incoming competence (Highvs. Low). Students were randomly assigned to four conditionsand split into High and Low groups based on their pre-testscores. All students used the same Intelligent Tutoring Sys-tem (ITS) called Pyrenees, followed the same general proce-dure, studied the same training materials, and worked throughthe same training problems. The only substantive differencesamong the four conditions were decision agency and granular-ity. That is: who decided to present an example or to solvea problem: the student or the ITS tutor; and was the deci-sion made problem-by-problem or step-by-step? Our overallresults showed that there were significant different impacts ofthe decision agency and granularity between High and Lowstudents on learning performance. More specifically, for Highstudents granularity was the more dominant factor in that steplevel decisions can be more effective than problem level deci-sions regardless of the decision agency; for Low students therewas a significant interaction effect in that: Low students ben-efit significantly more when they were making problem-leveldecisions than making step-level decisions, but no significantdifference was not found when the decisions were made bythe tutor. Much to our surprise, both High and Low groupsshowed strong decision-making preference for problem solv-ing over worked example at both problem and step levels.