A Comparison of Tutoring Strategies for Recovering from a Failed Attempt During Faded Support.

The support the tutor provides for a student is expected to fade over time as the student makes progress towards mastery of the learning objectives. One way in which the tutor can fade support is to prompt or elicit a next step that requires the student to fill in some intermediate actions or reasoning on her own. But what should the tutor do if the student is unable to complete such a step? In human-human tutoring interactions, a tutor may remediate by explicitly covering the missing intermediate steps with the student and in some contexts this behavior correlates with learning. But if there are multiple intermediate steps that need to be made explicit, the tutor could focus the student’s attention on the last successful step and then move forward through the intermediate steps (forward reasoning) or the tutor could focus the student’s attention on the intermediate step just before the failed step and move backward through the intermediate steps (backward reasoning). In this paper we explore when the forward strategy or backward strategy may be beneficial for remediation. We also compare the two faded support+remediation strategies to a control in which support is never faded and found that faded support was not detrimental to student learning outcomes when the two remediation strategies were available and it took significantly less time on task to achieve similar learning gains when starting the tutor-student interaction with faded support.