For human learning (HL)
we have established a rigorous way to assess the impact of a "curricular experience" on each human player. A "curriculum" is the set of rules that a player has encountered preceding the rule that is being analyzed. Let us call these rules A and B. The experience depends on whether the player managed to discover one or both of them. We represent this with a lower case letter if the player did not solve it; with the upper case for instances when the player did solve it. We can then study combination of concepts, such as "remove pieces in reading order ( R). and place them in the nearest bucket (N)" (using Greek letter θ to represent this "target rule"). We divide the participants so that they encounter all five curricula:
θ; Rθ;Nθ; RNθ, and NRθ.
Their experiences before θ may thus be any of
r,n,R,N,rN,Rn,rn,RN,nr,nR,Nr, NR.
We then ask: how much does each of these experiences affect the ease of discovering the target rule θ? Results for this particular compound rule are shown in Figure 1. The x-axis is the number of the move at which a player begins a string of 10 moves without error (called m*.) The y-axis shows the cumulated fraction of all players whose "aha" for that curricular experience comes at or before a given move; the marked point represents M*, the median value for those players who do solve the rule. Note that the cumulated distribution at this point is half of the fraction (F*) of all players who do solve the rule. Generally, when a curricular experience makes the rule easier, its representative point is both above and to the left of the representative point for condition θ, the target rule with no prior experience.
Cite as: Kantor, Paul; Menkov, Vladimir. "Visualizing Curricular Effects" URL:https://wwwtest.rulegame.wisc.edu/ExampleFindings/CurricularEffects.html
Roles. Design of analysis, visualization and human data by PK; analysis program and image generation by VM
