Even newer results (2002) show Ms. Lindquist leads to more learning as well as motivational benefits

Click Here for this latest study. Converted from Word-to-html version --- word .doc version

What follows is a summary of Heffernan's dissertation results from 2001.

The dialogs Ms. Lindquist engages students in work!!

Study Design

We just completed a controlled study where we compared the instruction Ms Lindquist provides with a traditional computer-aided approach. Please note: These results are being prepared for publication in a peer reviewed journal but we wanted to share them with the community of users of Ms. Lindquist.

Ms. Lindquist is able to carry on a running conversation, complete with probing questions, positive and negative feedback, follow-up questions in embedded sub-dialogs, and requests for explanation as to why something is correct.
Traditional Computer-Aided Instruction(CAI) simply told the students the answer if the student got a question wrong. You can think of this condition being analogous to a student doing homework with the answers in the back of the book but no additional help.

Everything else was held the same between the two conditions including the number of problems done.

Results

Students were given a 6 item post test after about 2 hours of instruction. Students using Ms. Lindquist did better on the post test ( The effect size of .8 was large and we had a p value of .2. We only had 20 students.).

Conclusion

This formative analysis showed that students benefitted from the dialog that Ms. Lindquist engaged them in. Why is this the case? Well one student who received the traditional computer aided instruction complained that the the computer wasn't very helpful because "It just tells you the answer." Ms Lindquist instead asked new questions of students to try to break the problems down for them. These results show that the dialogs Ms. Lindquist engages students in is effective in promoting student learning.

Future Work

We are continuing to improve Ms. Lindquist by adding more and better tutorial strategies. Thanks to all the teachers who have participated.

Back to The Ms. Lindquist Algebra Tutoring Web Site.

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