Colloquium
Ken Koedinger, Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University
Title: An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate: Implications for Achieving Educational Equity
Abstract: I will talk about our recent 2023 PNAS paper with the followingabstract: Leveraging a scientific infrastructure for exploring how students learn, we have developed cognitive and statistical models of skill acquisition and used them to understand fundamental similarities and differences across learners. Our primary question was why do some students learn faster than others? Or, do they? We model data from student performance on groups of tasks that assess the same skill component and that provide follow-up instruction on student errors. Our models estimate, for both students and skills, initial correctness and learning rate, that is, the increase in correctness after each practice opportunity. We applied our models to 1.3 million observations across 27 datasets of student interactions with online practice systems in the context of elementary to college courses in math, science, and language. Despite the availability of up-front verbal instruction, like lectures and readings, students demonstrate modest initial pre-practice performance, at about 65% accuracy. Despite being in the same course, students’ initial performance varies substantially from about 55% correct for those in the lower half to 75% for those in the upper half. In contrast, and much to our surprise, we found students to be astonishingly similar in estimated learning rate, typically increasing by about 0.1 log odds or 2.5% in accuracy per opportunity. These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate.
In addition to discussing these recent analyses, I will describe recent efforts pursuing the hope inherent in this evidence: That given favorable learning conditions for deliberate practice and given the learner invests effort in sufficient learning opportunities, indeed, anyone can learn anything they want. In particular, we have been experimenting with cost-effective methods to provide math students with extra human tutoring toward increasing their motivation to engage in practice and we have demonstrated promise in reducing achievement gaps by so reducing opportunity gaps.
Please join us for coffee and snacks starting at 3:00 outside the venue and a reception with food and drinks afterwords in the Psychology Lounge in Building 420.