SELF-EXPLANATION ON LEARNING BY TEACHING SIMSTUDENT: DOES IT IMPROVE LEARNING?

This study examined whether incorporating self-explanation or justification of tutoring activities in teaching SimStudent improves the learning and conceptual understanding of students in solving linear equation. SimStudent is a computer agent that interactively learns problem-solving skills through its own tutored-problem solving experience. Existing data logs, gathered from a prior experiment that also intended to investigate the effect of self-explanation in learning by teaching were used in this study. This paper described the features of the data logs through an exploratory-analysis web application: PSLC DataShop.

This application was used to:
1) determine the knowledge components found in the data logs, and
2) compare the learning curves of the two groups of students— the self-explained group and the baseline group.

This study showed that students improved their skills in solving linear equation as evident in the learning curve of both groups. Further analysis revealed that error-rate—number of hints or incorrect— decreased as attempts to solve a problem were made. However, it was not apparent that the improvement on the self-explanation group was due to incorporating self-explanation as there was no significant difference in the means between the error-rate of the two groups of students.