Investigating Effects of Embedding Collaboration in an Intelligent Tutoring System for Elementary School Students
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are beneficial for individual students learning in several domains, including mathematics where they have been used to support both secondary and elementary students. Collaborative learning may be beneficial to include in ITSs, particularly for conceptual knowledge. There is little work on collaborative ITSs, and it has mostly focused on older students. We aim to extend this work to elementary school students, by extending an ITS for fractions so it supports collaborative learning. We also build upon our previous work to further investigate the complementary strengths of collaborative and individual learning. In our study, 189 elementary school students worked with a conceptual or a procedural fractions ITS, and either individually or collaboratively. Students in both ITS conditions learned, but there were no differences in learning between individual and collaboration. However, the students working collaboratively spent less time on the tutor, indicating potential benefits of collaborative learning on efficiency in this setting.
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