David Pritchard
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Physics department

The promise and reality of web-based tutoring

Textbooks, Lectures, and most educational uses of the web are like 
broadcast radio: a message is prepared and broadcast. One can find out how 
many people are tuned in, but determining whether they are truly listening 
is difficult. In my view the great promise of the web is two way learning. 
This means individualized problems and responses to their answers for the 
student, formative and summative assessment based on the instructor's 
assignments, and data and guidance to help the author improve his/her 
material and pedagogy. Web-based intelligent tutors offer interactive 
tutoring for individual students, such as pedagogically useful responses 
to their wrong answers and hints and simpler subproblems upon student 
request. Our research shows that MIT students using 
www.masteringphysics.com learn about twice as much per unit time as when 
doing hand-graded written homework, giving a learning effect of two 
standard deviations. Feedback from the students can reveal specific 
student mistakes and misconceptions, provide rich data allowing authors to 
improve their content, and show class difficulties on each problem for 
Just In Time Teaching. Our research shows that assessing the process of 
solution can give a far more precise asseessment than can testing, 
allowing targeted remediatioin. Splitting the class into two groups that 
work the same problem but with different preparation shows evidence of 
knowledge transfer.