Identification, Exploration, and Remediation: Can Teachers Predict Common Wrong Answers?

Prior work analyzing tutoring sessions provided evidence that highly effective tutors, through their interaction with students and their experience, can perceptively recognize incorrect processes or “bugs” when students incorrectly answer problems. Researchers have studied these tutoring interactions examining instructional approaches to address incorrect processes and observed that the format of the feedback can influence learning outcomes. In this work, we recognize the incorrect answers caused by these buggy processes as Common Wrong Answers (CWAs). We examine the ability of teachers and instructional designers to identify CWAs proactively. As teachers and instructional designers deeply understand the common approaches and mistakes students make when solving mathematical problems, we examine the feasibility of proactively identifying CWAs and generating Common Wrong Answer Feedback (CWAFs) as a formative feedback intervention for addressing student learning needs. As such, we analyze CWAFs in three sets of analyses. We first report on the accuracy of the CWAs predicted by the teachers and instructional designers on the problems across two activities. We then measure the effectiveness of the CWAFs using an intent-to-treat analysis. Finally, we explore the existence of personalization effects of the CWAFs for the students working on the two mathematics activities.