Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While there is substantial evidence showing that assistanceprovided to students during problem-solving activitiesinfluences learning outcomes, it is not yet clear how to bestdesign educational technologies to maximize learning throughvarious types of assistance. One common type of assistancecorresponds to hints delivered by an educational technology.To date, however, there is little research on the impact ofdifferent types of hints, including high-level hints vs. specificbottom-out hints. Our research takes a step in filling this gap,through an experimental study with an intelligent tutoringsystem we implemented in the domain of algebra (N = 50).We did not find evidence that the type of hint, high level vs.bottom out, influenced learning, with both types of hintsproducing similar outcomes. We did, however, find supportfor the conclusion that the number of hints accessed interactedwith the type of hint to influence learning, and specifically,that accessing more hints was correlated with learning butonly in the high-level hint condition.