Your study will be in the form of a problem set (or sets) delivered to students. If you are intending to use our subject pool you will need to create this study so that you are comparing two normal instructional strategies (to pass our IRB). This section will describe the process of creating the problems in your problem set. We will also show how you can and share these problem sets with colleagues as you work.
Tutoring Strategies
As a researcher, tutoring strategies can become the focus of your experimental design. You can use these methods to help students solve a problem or to deliver an intervention. Please note that if you add more than one strategy to a problem and both strategies are enabled, each student will be randomly assigned to one or the other, they will not see both.
Hints
This option offers a simple statement for students who answered the main problem incorrectly. Hints do not require students to answer any sub-questions, they just offer guidance. The final hint should always provide students the answer – this is called the Bottom Out Hint. Providing students the answer ensures that they will reach the next problem, or finish the problem set. The following video offers a step-by-step tutorial of how to add a hint to a problem:
Building and ASSISTments with Hints Note: this video is shows a dated interface.
Scaffolds
When a student answers the main problem incorrectly, the problem can be broken down into a scaffold or a set of sub-questions. While the navigation is slightly outdated, these videos offer a succinct view of how to best use scaffolds:
Building an ASSISTment with Scaffolds part 1
Building an ASSISTment with Scaffolds part 2
As you grow accustomed to the system, you can get very creative with scaffolds and hints. You may wish to embed a scaffold within a scaffold to better design a condition. More advanced building instructions can be found at the ASSISTments advanced builder instruction site.
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