Fostering the Intelligent Novice: Learning From Errors With Metacognitive Tutoring

Abstract

This article explores 2 important aspects of metacognition: (a) how students monitor their ongoing performance to detect and correct errors and (b) how students reflect on those errors to learn from them. Although many instructional theories have advocated providing students with immediate feedback on errors, some researchers have argued that immediate feedback eliminates the opportunity for students to practice monitoring for and learning from errors. Thus, they advocate delayed feedback. This article provides evidence that this line of reason is flawed and suggests that rather than focusing on the timing of feedback, instructional designers should focus on the "model of desired performance" with respect to which feedback is provided. Instead of delaying feedback, we suggest broadening our model of correct behavior or desired performance to include some kinds of incorrect, but reasonable behaviors. This article explores the effects of providing feedback on the basis of a so-called intelligent novice cognitive model. A system based on an intelligent novice model allows students to make certain reasonable errors, and provides guidance through the exercise of error detection and correction skills. There are two pedagogical motivations for feedback based on an intelligent novice model. First, jobs today not only require ready-made expertise for dealing with known problems, but also intelligence to address novel situation where nominal experts are thrown back to the state of a novice. Second, the opportunity to reason about the causes and consequences of errors may allow students to form a better model of the behavior of domain operators. Results show that students receiving intelligent novice feedback acquire a deeper conceptual understanding of domain principles and demonstrate better transfer and retention of skills over time.

The Effect of Hints and Model Answers in a Student-Controlled Problem-Solving Program for Secondary Physics Education

“…Researchers such as Wood and Wood (1999) and Mathan and Koedinger (2005) believe that an intelligent tutoring program can deliver the just-in-time instruction needed for a student. Others such as Reif (1995) and Harskamp and Suhre (2006) believe that the student should be in control of instruction and feedback.…”

“…However, once students have gained basic content knowledge and are asked to apply their knowledge to new problems, worked examples is no longer an effective instructional method. Other researchers claim that it is often not content knowledge that students lack when they try to solve new problems but strategic knowledge (Mathan and Koedinger 2005;Taconis 1995). Strategic knowledge allows students to analyse the problem, find relevant content knowledge, make a plan and solve the problem (De Jong and Ferguson-Hessler 1996).…”

Simulating serious games: a discrete-time computational model based on cognitive flow theory

“…It bypasses the complexities of instructional content and didactics by postulating that engagement in a game activity entails a productive learning experience. The productive influence of failure on learning is not (yet) accounted for (Mory, 2003;Mathan & Koedinger, 2005). Second, although "game activities" are a key concept in the model, the meso-level indication does not say much about their grainsize.…”

Lecture‐free biochemistry

“…It is important that students feel comfortable enough to ''try out'' an idea in order to obtain feedback from their group. Even feedback from other novices has been shown to result in deeper conceptual understanding and retention of skills over time [34]. Team covenants are created each time a new team is formed [35].…”

“…Specifically, 4 of the 5 students who preferred lecture, self-reported the four lowest levels of understanding of biochemical concepts (questions [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. 3 of the 5 preferring lecture also self-reported the three lowest levels of gains in process skills (questions [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. It is impossible to know whether these students' perceived lack of achievement is due to a lack of lecture or whether their sense of accomplishment would have been equally low at the end of a lecture-based course.…”