Exercise parameters influencing exercise difficulty

Abstract

Macro-adaptive systems aim to assign practice exercises to language learners that match their proficiency levels. While learner-dependent parameters of exercise difficulty need to be considered online, learner-independent parameters can inform an exercise’s difficulty level in a resource-efficient offline procedure. We present an evaluation of learners’ responses to form-based grammar exercises that aims to identify learner-independent exercise parameters affecting exercise complexity. The results indicate that the exercise type can yield coarse-grained complexity estimates, whereas exercise type specific features can inform more fine-grained estimates. For fine-grained estimates, we show that syntactic variants significantly impact exercise difficulty. Since there is strong variation between learning targets and learners with respect to the impact of different exercise parameters on a learner’s performance, exercise difficulty can only be reliably determined if the exercises are created in a systematic way and by also considering characteristics of the learner.