Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explored the impact of three types of decision granularity,problem level (Prob), step level (Step), and both problem andstep levels (Both), on student learning. We first conducted anempirical study to directly compare the three conditions andthen three subsequent studies to evaluate one or two of thethree conditions. Overall our empirical results showed therewas no significant difference among the three conditions. Wefurther split students into different groups based on their per-formances on the single-principle and the multiple-principleproblems in the pre-test. Solving the single-principle problemsonly involves one step while solving the multiple-principleones involves generating multiple steps in a logic order. Wedefine High students as those who were correct on all single-principle problems and at least one multiple-principle ones inthe pre-test, Low students as those who were correct on someor all single-principle problems but no multiple-principle ones,and the rest are in the Medium group. Our empirical resultsshowed that for Low students, Both can be better than Step.For the Medium and High students, no clear conclusions couldbe drawn because of small sample sizes. As a result, in apost-hoc analysis all students were combined by their assignedconditions. Overall, while no significant difference was foundamong the three conditions, we found that the impact of threetypes of granularity, Prob, Step, and Both differs significantlyfor High vs. Low students: Both, Step > Prob for the Highstudents and Both, Prob > Step for the Low students. No clearconclusions could be drawn for the Medium group due to itssmall sample sizes. In short, while Prob could be effective forLow students but ineffective for High ones and Step could beeffective for High students but ineffective for Low ones, Bothseemed to be effective for both High and Low students.