Abstracts - Earli

feasible as there is often a clearer separation between the central design and production ofinstructional materials and tutorial support for students. Nonetheless, it is important to investigatestudents’ conceptions of effective tutoring before examining their experiences of being tutored inonline contexts and how they compare and contrast with face-to-face experiences, particularly ifany kind of automated tutorial support is ever to be realistically considered. The findings reportedare drawn from two studies that investigate students’ views of effective tutoring in a distanceeducation context. One is a quantitative study that investigates students’ beliefs about whatconstitutes effective tutoring; the other is a qualitative study that compares and contrasts students’experiences of tutoring in face-to-face and online contexts. Both studies show that academicsupport is only one aspect of what students consider to be effective tutoring. The comparison ofstudents’ experiences in the online and face-to-face contexts illustrated that while they held similarconceptions of tutoring their experiences were different – where the online experience tended to beinferior to the face-to-face. This suggests that there is much work to be done in understanding thenature of online communication and how to achieve effective online interaction before onlinetuition can be deemed to be as effective as face-to-face tuition.Does learning from examples improve tutored problem solving?Ron Salden, Carnegie Mellon University, USAVincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, USAAlexander Renkl, University of Freiburg, GermanyRolf Schwonke, University of Freiburg, GermanyJoerg Wittwer, Leibniz Institute for Science Education, Kiel, GermanyCarmen Krieg, University of Freiburg, GermanyAlthough problem solving supported by Cognitive Tutors, an intelligent tutoring system, has beenshown to be successful in fostering initial acquisition of cognitive skills, this approach does notseem to be optimal with respect to focusing the learner on the domain principles to be learned. Inorder to foster a deep understanding of domain principles and how they are applied in problemsolving, we combine the theoretical rationales of Cognitive Tutors and example-based learning.Results from two lab studies indicate that while the effectiveness between a standard CognitiveTutor and an example-enriched Cognitive Tutor does not differ, the example-enriched CognitiveTutor is more efficient in terms of learning time. Furthermore, when additional instructions on theuse of the Tutor are provided, the example-enriched Tutor is more efficient in terms of learningtime and it significantly increased the students’ conceptual understanding. Based on these findingsthe example-enriched Tutor has been further optimized to take the individual student’s progressinto account. This refined example-enriched Tutor is being addressed in current and upcomingexperiments.– 137 –