Tutoring: Guided Learning by Doing.

Abstract

Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivated outcomes. In this paper, we seek to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and consider why these actions should be pedagogically useful. This experiment examined students learning LISP programming with the assistance of a tutor. Tutoring sessions we audiotaped, allowing us to analyze every verbal utterance during the sessions and thereby identify the conversational events that led to pedagogical success. This discourse analysis suggests that tutors are successful because they take a very active role in leading the problem solving by offering confirmatory feedback additional guidance while students are on profitable paths and error feedback after mistakes. However, tutor carefully structure their feedback to allow students to perform as much of the work as possible while ensuring that problem solving stays on track These results suggest the types of strategies tutors employ to facilitate guided learning by doing.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1996
Accession Number
ADA309385

Entities

People

  • Brian J. Reiser
  • Douglas C. Merrill
  • Shannon K. Merrill
  • Shari Landes

Organizations

  • Northwestern University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive Science
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Debugging
  • Feedback
  • Guidance
  • Information Processing
  • Language
  • Learning
  • Mental Processes
  • New York
  • Psychology
  • Social Sciences
  • Students

Fields of Study

  • Education

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design