VOLUME 5 ISSUE 3
Special Issue ICEL New York 2007

Help! Active Student Learning and Error Remediation in an Online Calculus e-Help Community

Carla van de Sande and Gaea Leinhardt
University of Pittsburgh, USA

Free, open, online homework help sites appear to be extremely popular and exist for many school subjects. Students can anonymously post problems at their convenience and receive responses from forum members. This mode of tutoring may be especially critical for school subjects such as calculus that are intrinsically challenging and have high attrition rates. However, educational research has focused on tutoring sessions that instruct students on a pre-determined set of material or topics, and there has been no systematic research on these dynamic, free, open, online tutoring communities. In order to distinguish the student-initiated e-help episodes from traditional tutoring sessions, we refer to them as “tutorettes.”

Participation and problem solving attempts provided evidence of active student learning. Instead of simply using the tutors to do their homework, many students made initial attempts at solutions, queried tutor responses, and applied the help they received to make progress on solving problems. This behavior appeared to be influenced by the actions of the tutor: Providing solution sketches accompanied by asking direct questions encouraged dialogue, whereas providing quasi-complete worked solutions seemed to have the opposite effect.

In contrast to classroom instruction, students in this e-help community appeared comfortable in presenting incorrect work and tutors were open and forthright in their commentaries, evaluations, and explanations. In addition, tutors modulated their responses according to the type of error. Pre-calculus errors and operational (calculus) errors were not accorded the same depth of explanation as conceptual misunderstandings.

Keywords: tutoring, e-help communities, discussion forums, calculus tutoring

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