Assistance that fades in improves learning better than assistance that fades out

What do Scanpaths Tell Us About Cognitive Processes? An Investigation in a Problem Solving Domain

“…Prior results also showed instructional material impacted alternative outcome measures. Jennings and Muldner (2020) found the fade in condition had higher performance scores than the fade out condition. Additionally, participants in fade in condition spent more time looking at the problem area compared to fixation results from the fade out condition.…”

“…The present thesis aims to contribute to the field of scanpath investigation by analyzing two different eye-tracking data sets (Tan, Muldner, and LeFevre, 2016;Jennings and Muldner, 2020). The first data set comes from a study investigating the impact of format in basic arithmetic problems, i.e., 18 ÷ 3 = [ ] (Tan, Muldner, and LeFevre, 2016).…”

“…The first data set comes from a study investigating the impact of format in basic arithmetic problems, i.e., 18 ÷ 3 = [ ] (Tan, Muldner, and LeFevre, 2016). The second data set comes from a study investigating the impact of example format for solving algebraic math problems, such as "b = ((c(a+f))÷d)-e" (Jennings and Muldner, 2020). Thus, in both studies students had to solve math problems but these problems varied in complexity from basic (study 1) to more complex (study 2).…”

“…In this Chapter, we present scanpath analysis 2 1 . The analysis used data from a study that presented algebra problems for students to solve that were paired with examples illustrating solutions to similar problems (Jennings and Muldner, 2020). Examples are commonly used in instructional materials such as textbooks, worksheets and online platforms.…”

“…When a problem and example pair are similar to each other, this promotes copying, as compared to when the problemexample similarity is reduced (Borracci et al, 2020;Lee, Betts, and Anderson, 2015;Muldner and Conati, 2010). More recently, Jennings and Muldner (2020) investigated the impact of varying problem-example similarity over time. They characterised problem-example similarity as the level of assistance: high similarity corresponded to high assistance, because the example solution could be copied, while reduced similarity corresponded to reduced assistance, because rather than copying, students had to solve the problem without copying.…”