Adaptive
learning products are one of the hotter trends to hit the academic world
lately, largely because of their potential to customize instruction to each
student’s capabilities and comprehension. That’s easier said than done,
according to a new Dutch study published in the Review of Educational Research and reported by the blog Education
by the Numbers.
The adaptive
function typically kicks in when a student gives a wrong answer in the assessment
portion and tries to help the student understand the correct answer, sometimes
simply by flagging an erroneous response and inviting the student to pick
another. The idea, apparently, is that the student will immediately understand
how they goofed.
“But just
the opposite is true,” noted the blog’s post. “Simply marking wrong answers was
the worst form of feedback.” Some students using this type of software even got
lower scores than students without any sort of feedback at all.
Providing
the right answer helped students more, the Dutch researchers found, but an even
more effective method was offering an explanation or at least some kind of clue
that might steer a student toward the correct answer. However, the study
determined it was difficult to customize explanations or hints because students
may be misunderstanding the material for different reasons.
The study
also discovered that adaptive learning software sometimes jumped in with the
correct answer or explanation a little too quickly, before the student had time
to digest the lesson. When the topic was “something more complicated, students
learned more when the feedback was delayed a bit, perhaps until after the
student had answered all the questions,” the blog noted.
