ERIC Number: EJ1141628
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-May
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Forgetting of Foreign-Language Skills: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Online Tutoring Software
Ridgeway, Karl; Mozer, Michael C.; Bowles, Anita R.
Cognitive Science, v41 n4 p924-949 May 2017
We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone® foreign-language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students. We find that lessons which are better learned initially are forgotten more slowly, a correlation which likely reflects a latent cause such as the quality or difficulty of the lesson. We obtain improved predictive accuracy of the forgetting model by augmenting it with features that encode characteristics of a student's initial study of the lesson and the activities the student engaged in between the initial and delayed tests. The augmented model can predict 23.9% of the variance in an individual's score on the delayed test. We analyze which features best explain individual performance.
Descriptors: Computational Linguistics, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Computer Software, Learning Activities, Language Tests, Correlation, Spanish, Difficulty Level, Educational Quality, Accuracy, Statistical Analysis, Scores, Prediction, Recall (Psychology), Intelligent Tutoring Systems
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: SES1461535; SBE0542013; SMA1041755
Author Affiliations: N/A