Can Help Seeking Be Tutored? Searching for the Secret Sauce of Metacognitive Tutoring

In our on-going endeavor to teach students better help-seeking skills we designed a three-pronged Help-Seeking Support Environment that includes (a) classroom instruction (b) a Self-Assessment Tutor, to help students evaluate their own need for help, and (c) an updated version of the Help Tutor, which provides feedback with respect to students’ help-seeking behavior, as they solve problems with the help of an ITS. In doing so, we attempt to offer a comprehensive helpseeking suite to support the knowledge, skills, and dispositions students need in order to become more effective help seekers. In a classroom evaluation, we found that the Help-Seeking Support Environment was successful in improving students’ declarative help-seeking knowledge, but did not improve students’ learning at the domain level or their help-seeking behavior in a paper-and-pencil environment. We raise a number of hypotheses in an attempt to explain these results. We question the current focus of metacognitive ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AIED
• Authors: Ido Roll, Vincent Aleven, Bruce M. McLaren, Kenneth R. Koedinger
• Keywords: AIED 2007, Artificial Intelligence, Effective Help Seekers, Help-seeking Behavior, Help-Seeking Support Environment