Recent models have proposed a Bayesian approximation for understanding pedagogical situations (Shafto et al, 2008) in which a knowledgeable teacher chooses limited examples with the objective of having a learner infer a concept. How does prior information about the teacher’s identity and his or her teaching strategies would affect learners’ inferences of new concepts? Moreover, in the current context of remote education, are there any differences in this effect?
We present a new paradigm, based on the Rectangle Game in which a teacher helps a learner to find a secret box on the screen using a limited set of cues. Young adults were placed in the learners’ role knowing (or not) that they were receiving cues generated by a teacher (2nd, 4th or 6th graders).
Our preliminary face-to-face interactions results indicate that (1) performance increases when playing consecutively with the same teacher and (2) knowing the teachers’ age is significantly useful when there is no other information available, but it seems to be overshadowed by the knowledge acquired along the trials about the teachers’ particular strategies. Our ongoing results suggest that knowing the teacher’s age has a less significant value. Instead, subjects seem to rely exclusively in the quality of those strategies used by their teachers.
Our preliminary results strongly suggest that we do not learn in the same way in a remote education or a face-to-face context.