Student Confidence

This study is in progress. It seeks to determine how a student's confidence changes during problem solving. Who appears "over confident" or "under confident"? This is an exploratory study that is not thought of as an intervention, but running it as randomized controlled trial allows us to look to see if even asking students to self-report their confidence changes that performance.

Control

Students receive ASSISTments assignments as usual. On the first, fifth, and ninth questions they are asked 'control' questions that do not affect their progress on math content. These questions request simple information like "what browser are you using?" The remaining questions deal with the multiplication and division of fractions.

First Problem:

Experiment

Students receive ASSISTments assignments as usual. On the first, fifth, and ninth questions they are asked 'treatment' questions that gauge the student's confidence in their ability to solve the types of questions in the Skill Builder. These questions do not affect their progress on math content, they simply gauge the student's persistence.

First Problem:

Fifth Problem:

Ninth Problem:

Between the above problems students got problems like this one.

Click here to try the problem set

Clicking on the link above will allow you to experience this study from the student's perspective. You will be randomly assigned to either the control or experimental conditions. Follow the link multiple times or refresh the preview page to experience each condition.

Lang, C., Heffernan, N., Ostrow, K., & Wang, Y. (In Press). The Impact of Incorporating Student Confidence Items into an Intelligent Tutor: A Randomized Controlled Trial. To be included in Procedings of the 8th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. Madrid, Spain. (Raw Data Available Here, Processed Data File Raw).