Tell me how to teach, I’ll learn how to solve problems

Abstract

In this paper we study the effect of adaptive scaffolding to learning by teaching. We hypothesize that learning by teaching is facilitated if (1) students receive adaptive scaffolding on how to teach and how to prepare for teaching (the metacognitive hypothesis), (2) students receive adaptive scaffolding on how to solve problems (the cognitive hypothesis), or (3) both (the hybrid hypothesis). We conducted a classroom study to test these hypotheses in the context of learning to solve equations by teaching a synthetic peer, SimStudent. The results show that the metacognitive scaffolding facilitated tutor learning (regardless of the presence of the cognitive scaffolding), whereas cognitive scaffolding had virtually no effect. The same pattern was confirmed by two additional datasets collected from two previous school studies we conducted.