Mathematics Education Seminar Online

Heuristic trees to foster compression during teacher-independent problem solving

Rogier Bos (Freudenthal Institute, UU)

How should we support students’ problem solving in absence of the teacher, working from home – after school or during a pandemic? The problem is that, so far, digital tutoring systems lack the ability to diagnose students’ needs in open problem situations and provide heuristic support. Our approach is based on students' ability to self-diagnose and then find suitable help. To this purpose we introduced a new type of digital, interactive help-seeking tool called heuristic tree. The design of heuristic trees is based on our reinterpretation of the notion of heuristic in term of terms of compression. Our research question is: How do heuristic trees influence students' problem-solving behaviour? In this presentation we discuss how we studied this question in the context of a Number Theory course for in-service mathematics teachers, and present the results.

This presentation is based on joint work with Theo van den Bogaart. If you are interested and read Dutch, then have a look at the heuristic trees web-based user and designer tool here .

Mathematics Education Seminars are conducted monthly; additional information can be found on the seminar webpage

If you would like to receive invitations to further meetings, please subscribe to the mailing list, or contact us: Rogier Bos and/or Anna Shvarts