When do Students Interrupt Help? Effects of Time, Help Type, and Individual Differences

When do students interrupt help to request different help? To study this question, we embedded a within-subject experiment in the 2003-2004 version of Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor. We analyze 168,983 trials of this experiment, randomized by help type, and report patterns in when students choose to interrupt help. Using the amount of prior help, we fit an exponential curve to predict interruption rate with an r2 of 0.97 on aggregate data and an r2 of 0.22 on individual data. To improve the model fit for individual data, we adjust our model to account for different types of help and individual differences. Finally, we report small but significant correlations between a student parameter in our model and external measures of motivation and academic performance.