Do Novices and Advanced Students benefit from Erroneous Examples differently?

Abstract

Learning from problem solving, worked examples, and Erroneous Examples (ErrEx) have all proven to be effective learning strategies. However, what kind of learning material should be provided to students with different level of prior knowledge within Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is still an open question. Recently, alternating worked examples and problem solving (AEP) has been shown to benefit students compared to problems only or worked examples only in SQL-Tutor (Najar & Mitrovic, 2013). However, how students with different prior knowledge learn from ErrEx in SQL-Tutor is unknown. In this paper, we compared AEP to a new instructional strategy (WPEP) which provides ErrEx in addition to worked examples and problem solving to students. The results show that that both novices and advanced students improved their post-test scores significantly in either condition. Our findings also show that novices acquired significantly more debugging knowledge when erroneous examples were presented (WPEP) in comparison to the AEP condition. Moreover, both novices and advanced students benefitted from ErrEx. In particular, advanced students who studied with erroneous examples showed better performance on problem solving as measured by the number of attempts per problem.