Three Strikes and Who is Out?
Individual Differences in Error-Induced Quitting

Annie Johansson, Abe Hofman, Alexander Savi, Han van der Maas
University of Amsterdam


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Abstract

The biggest threat to learning is not engaging in it. Crucially, sequential errors have been found to be an important cause of quitting from educational practice. However, little is known about how students are differently affected by sequential errors. Here, we investigate the underlying factors. Using intensive longitudinal practicing data from over 200,000 primary-school students in a large-scale Online Learning Environment (OLE), we confirm previous findings that sequential errors strongly increase the probability of quitting from learning. Second, we find large variability in this effect, ranging from no or small tendencies to quit to high sensitivities to quitting following sequential errors. We validate these results in an independent dataset, and show that individual differences are stable across two across two arithmetic practice domains. Our results corroborate the theoretical notion that students differ in their tolerance to failure and pinpoint a need to individualize how computer-adaptive systems intervene after errors.

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Citation


    @misc{johansson2024,
      title={Three Strikes and Who is Out? Individual Differences in Error-Induced Quitting},
      url={osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/6tduv},
      DOI={10.31234/osf.io/6tduv},
      publisher={PsyArXiv},
      author={Johansson, Annie M. and Savi, Alexander O. and van der Maas, Han L. J. and Hofman, Abe D.},
      year={2024},
      month={Jun}
    }

Correspondence

You are welcome to contact the first author of the paper, Annie Johansson, for any inquiries about the work.

a.m.johansson2@uva.nl