The Effect of Teachers Reassigning Students to New Cognitive Tutor Sections / Adam C. Sales and John F. Pane.

The design of the Cognitive Tutor Algebra I (CTA1) intelligent tutoring system assumes that students work through sections of material following a pre-specified order, and only move on from one section to the next after mastering the first section's skills. However, the software gives teachers...

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Bibliographic Details
Online Access: Full Text (via ERIC)
Main Authors: Sales, Adam C., Pane, John F. (Author)
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: [Place of publication not identified] : Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse, 2020.
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Summary:The design of the Cognitive Tutor Algebra I (CTA1) intelligent tutoring system assumes that students work through sections of material following a pre-specified order, and only move on from one section to the next after mastering the first section's skills. However, the software gives teachers the flexibility to override that structure, by reassigning students to different sections of the curriculum. Which students get reassigned? Does reassignment hurt student learning? Does it help? This paper used data from the treatment arm of a large effectiveness study of the CTA1 curriculum to estimate the effects of reassignment on students' scores on an Algebra I posttest. Since reassignment is not randomized, we used a multilevel propensity score matching design, along with assessments of sensitivity to bias from unmeasured confounding, to estimate the effects of reassignment. We found that reassignment reduces posttest scores by roughly 0.2 standard deviations--about the same as the overall CTA1 treatment effect--that unmeasured confounding is unlikely to completely explain this observed effect, and that the effect of reassignment may vary widely between classrooms. [For the full proceedings, see ED607784.]
Item Description:Availability: International Educational Data Mining Society. e-mail: admin@educationaldatamining.org; Web site: http://www.educationaldatamining.org.
Sponsoring Agency: National Science Foundation (NSF).
Contract Number: DRL1420374.
Abstractor: As Provided.
Educational level discussed: High Schools.
Educational level discussed: Secondary Education.
Physical Description:1 online resource (10 pages)