Decoding the performance in an out-of-context problem during blocked practice

Abstract

To master a skill, students generally practice the content of the skill in a blocking manner. While practicing in a blocked fashion, students know the context of the problems and also which strategy is needed to arrive at a solution. However, in real life standardized tests, where problems from various skills are grouped together, students often find it challenging to identify the correct strategy to solve the problems. This is because, during learning, students often practice the content in isolation. It hinders their ability to discriminate among the contexts of the problem. In this work, using tutor funtoot, we present students working on the topic Addition Word Problems with a subtraction word problem and investigate how they perform in the out-of-context subtraction word problem. We find that students' performance in the topic Addition Word Problems is a strong predictor of their performance in this out-of-context problem. Our results suggest that it is a stronger predictor for higher grades (4th and 5th) compared to the lower (2nd and 3rd) grades.