Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study we explored the impact of student versus tutorpedagogical decision-making on learning. More specifically,we examined what would happen if we let students decidehow to handle the next task: to view it as a worked exam-ple or to solve it as a problem solving. We examined this im-pact at two levels of task granularity: problem vs. step. This2 × 2 study was conducted on an existing Intelligent TutoringSystem (ITS) called Pyrenees. 279 students were randomlyassigned to four conditions and the domain content and re-quired steps were strictly controlled to be equivalent acrossfour conditions: all students used the same system, followedthe same general procedure, studied the same training materi-als, and worked through the same training problems. The onlysubstantive differences among the four conditions were deci-sion agency {Student vs. Tutor} and granularity {Problem vs.Step}. That is: who decided to present an example or to solvea problem; and was the decision made problem-by-problem orstep-by-step? Our results showed that there was a significantinteraction effect between decision agency and granularity onstudent learning and a significant main effect of granularity ontime on training. That is, step level decisions can be more ef-fective than problem level decisions but the students were morelikely to make effective pedagogical decisions at problem levelthan step level. In general, on both problem and step levels, thestudents were significantly more likely to decide to do problemsolving rather than study it as a worked example.