ICER 2015 Preview: Subgoal Labeling Works for Text, Too

Briana Morrison is presenting the next stage of our work on subgoal labeled worked examples, with Lauren Margulieux. Their paper is “Subgoals, Context, and Worked Examples in Learning Computing Problem Solving.” As you may recall, Lauren did a terrific set of studies (presented at ICER 2012) showing how adding subgoal labels to videos of App Inventor worked examples had a huge effect on learning, retention, and transfer (see my blog post on this work here).

Briana and Lauren are now teaming up to explore new directions in educational psychology space and new directions in computing education research.

• In the educational psychology space, they’re asking, “What if you make the students generate the subgoal labels?” Past research has found that generating the subgoal labels, rather than just having them given to the students, is harder on the students but leads to more learning.
• They’re also exploring what if the example and the practice come from the same or different contexts (where the “context” here is the cover story or word problem story). For example, we might show people how to average test grades, but then ask them to average golf scores — that’s a shift in context.
• In the computing education research space, Briana created subgoal labeled examples for a C-like pseudocode.

One of the important findings is that they replicated the earlier study, but now in a text-based language rather than a blocks-based language. On average, subgoal labels on worked examples improve performance over getting the same worked examples without subgoal labels. That’s the easy message.

The rest of the results are much more puzzling. Being in the same context (e.g., seeing averaging test scores in the worked examples, then being asked to average test scores in the practice) did statiscally worse than having to shift contexts (e.g., from test scores to golf scores). Why might that be?

Generating labels did seem to help performance. The Generate group had the highest attrition. That make sense, because increased complexity and cognitive load would predict that more participants would give up. But that drop-our rate makes it hard make strong claims. Now we’re comparing everyone in the other groups to only “those who gut it out” in the Generate group. The results are more suspect.

There is more nuance and deeper explanations in Briana’s paper than I’m providing here. I find this paper exciting. We have an example here of well-established educational psychology principles not quite working as you might expect in computer science. I don’t think it puts the principles in question. It suggests to me that there may be some unique learning challenges in computer science, e.g., if the complexity of computer science is greater than in other studies, then it’s easier for us to reach cognitive overload. Briana’s line of research may help us to understand how learning computing is different from learning statistics or physics.