Research in Artificial Intelligent Tutoring

ASSISTments is a web-based tutoring program covering 4th to 10th grade mathematics, where students are given a problem and may request hints to guide them through the problem. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of ASSISTments in improving student learning. In this study, we analyze whether the hints improve student learning significantly over immediate correctness feedback. We found that while both methods of feedback improved student learning, neither one improved learning significantly better than the other. Especially when given easier problems, students were able to complete the problem sets in less time with answer-only feedback. Since hints took longer to complete and did not significantly improve student test scores, answer-only feedback may be more useful than hints