Show me the numbers! -- Student-facing Interventions in Adaptive Learning Environments for German Spelling

Abstract

Since adaptive learning comes in many shapes and sizes, it is crucial to find out which adaptations can be meaningful for which areas of learning. Our work presents the result of an experiment conducted on an online platform for the acquisition of German spelling skills. We compared the traditional online learning platform to three different adaptive versions of the platform that implement machine learning-based student-facing interventions that show the personalized solution probability. We evaluate the different interventions with regard to the error rate, the number of early dropouts, and the users competency. Our results show that the number of mistakes decreased in comparison to the control group. Additionally, an increasing number of dropouts was found. We did not find any significant effects on the users competency. We conclude that student-facing adaptive learning environments are effective in improving a persons error rate and should be chosen wisely to have a motivating impact.