Revelation of Task Difficulty in AI-aided Education

TL;DR

This paper explores how revealing the true difficulty of tasks affects student performance, motivation, and self-efficacy, using matchstick riddles, with implications for AI systems in education.

Contribution

It investigates the effects of revealing task difficulty on learners and discusses how AI can support optimal difficulty disclosure to enhance learning experiences.

Findings

Revealing true task difficulty influences motivation and self-efficacy.

AI systems can optimize when to reveal task difficulty for better learning outcomes.

Experimental results suggest tailored difficulty disclosure benefits student performance.

Abstract

When a student is asked to perform a given task, her subjective estimate of the difficulty of that task has a strong influence on her performance. There exists a rich literature on the impact of perceived task difficulty on performance and motivation. Yet, there is another topic that is closely related to the subject of the influence of perceived task difficulty that did not receive any attention in previous research - the influence of revealing the true difficulty of a task to the student. This paper investigates the impact of revealing the task difficulty on the student's performance, motivation, self-efficacy and subjective task value via an experiment in which workers are asked to solve matchstick riddles. Furthermore, we discuss how the experiment results might be relevant for AI-aided education. Specifically, we elaborate on the question of how a student's learning experience might be improved by supporting her with two types of AI systems: an AI system that predicts task difficulty and an AI system that determines when task difficulty should be revealed and when not.