curious how the tutor handles a kid who's confidently wrong. from the description the ladder kicks in at the first sign of struggle, which sounds like it's built to prevent mistakes rather than use them. kapur's productive failure work points the other way, students who commit to a wrong approach and then get shown exactly where it breaks tend to keep the concept. the ones who got steered away before making the mistake don't.
does bloomybot ever just let a wrong approach play out and do the postmortem after? also when a struggling student gets rerouted to an easier skill, can you tell that apart in your data from one who was thirty seconds away from the useful kind of failure? the summit gate tells you they arrived. it doesn't tell you whether the help in the middle did the teaching.
Good questions. I like that you're digging into the mechanics.
First principle: BloomyBot does not proactively engage the student unless they make 3 mistakes in a row in "Climb" (the practice portion). Then it engages them.
Otherwise, students can engage BloomyBot when they feel they need assistance.
If the student is confidently wrong and attempts to answer a question, they'll see the feedback that they're wrong, with an explanation. They can then clarify with BloomyBot. The goal here is (as you reference) to cultivate productive struggle. So we DO want the student to try their approach.
On getting rerouted to easier skills: students get 1 chance to attempt and fail a Climb. Enough questions wrong in a row (assuming they're trying) = signal that they either aren't ready to learn the skill or that they didn't pay attention to the instructional portion in Base Camp. We give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. If they fail Climb a second time, they get routed to a prerequisite skill.
The Climb gates Summit through Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Wilson et al. (2019) derived an “85% rule” from formal models of learning: training is most efficient when learners succeed at about 85% of attempts. So Bloomy uses BKT (Corbett & Anderson, 1995) to update each student’s estimated per-skill mastery after every response, and routes students to skills within their Zone of Proximal Development.
that's a clean answer thanks. the 85% rule for BKT routing is more principled than most. the one thing i'd still watch is wether summit mastery still holds or decays over time, since BKT can't tell "build the schema" from "learned to pass the gate". thanks for the detail.