The benefit of reflection prompts for encouraging learning with hints in an online programming course

While giving learners hints is a commonly used scaffolding practice to facilitate learning, previous work questioned the effectiveness of hints. In this study, we examined if prompting learners to reflect along with receiving hints could improve learning outcomes, including immediate and delayed performance, perceived learning, and enjoyment. A field experiment was conducted in a four-week long online master’s degree course on data science where we compared two conditions: a condition with hints and a condition providing reflection prompts along with hints. Results showed that using hints with reflection prompts increased learner performance in delayed knowledge transfer tasks while also increasing learners’ perception of learning. The combination of reflection prompts and hints did not reduce learners’ enjoyment of the tasks, suggesting that the use of hints with reflection prompts is not only an intervention which can improve learning outcomes but is one which will be naturally adopted by learners.