- C. Rosé, Johanna D. Moore, K. VanLehn, D. Allbritton. 2001. A comparative evaluation of socratic versus didactic tutoring. Abstract: A Comparative Evaluation of Socratic versus Didactic Tutoring Carolyn Penstein Ros´e (rosecp@pitt.edu) LRDC, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA, 15260, USA Johanna D. Moore (jmoore@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) HCRC, Univ. of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK Kurt VanLehn (vanlehn@pitt.edu) LRDC, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA, 15260, USA David Allbritton (dallbrit@condor.depaul.edu) Dept. of Psychology, DePaul Univ., Chicago, IL 60614, USA Abstract While the effectiveness of one-on-one human tutoring has been well established, a great deal of controversy sur- rounds the issue of which features of tutorial dialogue sep- arate effective uses of dialogue in tutoring from those that are less effective. In this paper we present a formal com- parison of Socratic versus Didactic style tutoring that ar- gues in favor of the Socratic tutoring style. Introduction Comparative studies of student learning have already demonstrated that one-on-one human tutoring is more ef- fective than other modes of instruction. Tutoring raises students’ proficiency as measured by pre and post-tests by a minimum of 0.40 standard deviations with peer tu- tors (Cohen et al., 1982), and to up to 2.0 standard devia- tions with experienced tutors (Bloom, 1984). One promi- nent component of effective human tutoring is collab- orative dialogue between student and tutor (Fox, 1993; Graesser et al., 1995; Merrill et al., 1992). Nevertheless, a great deal of controversy surrounds the issue of which features of tutorial dialogue distinguish effective uses of dialogue in tutoring from those that are less effective. In this paper we present the results of a formal evalua- tion of the relative effectiveness of Socratic versus Didac- tic tutoring in a simulated problem solving environment in the Basic Electricity and Electronics domain. In this study, the Socratic tutoring style is characterized by an emphasis on eliciting information from students through a directed line of reasoning. Thus, the tutor endeavors as much as possible to avoid giving information away. In contrast, in the Didactic tutoring style, the tutor be- gins extended interactions with students by presenting the student with an explanation of the material the student is meant to learn in the interaction. After the initial expla- nation, the tutor leads the student through a directed line of reasoning similar to that used in the Socratic condition, except that the questioning plays more of a role of draw- ing the student’s attention to information that the tutor has already explained, rather than eliciting this information from the student. Since drawing the student’s attention to the points already articulated by the tutor requires less from the students, the Didactic interactions tended to be significantly shorter than the Socratic interactions. They contained only 70% as many open ended questions and had more of a lecture like flavor than the Socratic inter- actions. In a classroom instructional context, it has been well argued that receptive learning, i.e., by means of lectures, can be just as effective as discovery based learning pro- vided that students have the requisite prior knowledge to learn the presented material meaningfully rather than by rote (Ausubel, 1978). However, this view has not been universally accepted by educational psychologists (Pi- aget, 1973; Vygotsky, 1978). Furthermore, one key dif- ference between tutoring and classroom learning is that there is much more continuity and regularity in classroom learning. In contrast, tutoring is sporadic and decontex- tualized. Thus, within a classroom setting the teacher is much more familiar with the students’ prior knowledge, and is in fact in a position to ensure that students are pre- pared to learn the material that is presented each day by arranging lessons to build one upon another. We argue that because this is not the case in a tutoring context, it is more critical to draw out the student’s thought process in order to tailor the presentation of material to the students’ needs. Previous studies have argued the effectiveness of So- cratic and other similar tutoring approaches. Recent re- search on student self-explanations supports the view that when students explain their thinking out loud it en- hances their learning (Chi et al., 1989, Chi et al., 1994, Renkl, submitted). Students learn more effectively when they are given the opportunity to discover knowledge for themselves (Brown and Kane, 1988; Lovett, 1992; Press- ley et al., 1992). Collins and Stevens (1982) report that the best teachers tend to use a Socratic tutoring style. A tutoring system based on the Collins and Stevens model (Wong et al., 1998) has received favorable reviews al- though it has not yet been subjected to a formal compar- ative evaluation. Nevertheless, other studies have argued the effective- ness of Didactic style tutoring. In a recent study in which students read previously solved probability prob- lems (Renkl, submitted), an experimental group that had the option to request further tutor explanation performed better than a control group that did not have that op- tion, with an effect size of .5 sigma. Albacete (1999) found that students who received Didactic conceptual minilessons when they made errors learned more than students who received immediate flag feedback and could
