The code was created for MindSort (Léoné, in prep) - a digital vocabulary learning platform inspired by cognitive neuroscientific findings - for my 2023 Bachelor thesis 'Adaptive Contrasting: Achieving Desirable Difficulty in Vocabulary'.
The study expands upon the work of Baxter et al. (2021) by developing new contrasting methods that could be integrated into educational software, spanning from flashcard applications to language learning platforms like Duolingo or Quizlet. This study specifically evaluated the effects of adaptive difficulty scaling in orthographic contrasting tasks on vocabulary learning, which was based on the underlying hypothesis that contrasting only facilitates vocabulary learning when the difficulty is appropriate to the learner’s capabilities. To investigate this, two contrasting methods were developed for MindSort for this study: a static method which consistently presented very similar words, and an adaptive method where word similarity increased as learning progressed. The adaptive method aims to achieve a desirable level of activation of lexical representations in the learner’s mental lexicon to minimize confusion and enhance learning outcomes.
For both methods, participants were presented with three foreign words: one of which is the translation of the target word shown on the top of the screen. In the experimental condition (i.e. the adaptive contrasting method), when a participant clicked on the correct translation, the following trial with the same target word would increase the similarity of the three foreign words by one level out of a maximum of three. The three difficulty levels are showcased in Figure 1.
Figure 1. From left to right: dissimilar (easy difficulty), somewhat similar (moderate difficulty), and very similar (hard difficulty).
In the end, the results did not indicate that the adaptive contrasting method had a statistically significant effect on learning performance or learning outcomes, potentially due to a small sample size and a smaller-than-anticipated difficulty gap between the control and experimental conditions. Despite the lack of significant effects, the study offers directions for future research that can contribute to the development of more refined adaptive contrasting methods.
Baxter, P., Droop, M., Van Den Hurk, M., Bekkering, H., Dijkstra, T., & Leoné, F. (2021). Contrasting similar words facilitates second language vocabulary learning in children by sharpening lexical representations. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 688160.
Leoné, F.T.M. (in prep). A prescriptive bridge between neuroscience and education: through computational modelling.