Revelation of Task Difficulty in AI-aided Education

Abstract--When a student is asked to perform a given task, her subjective estimate of the difficulty of that task has a strong influence on her performance. There exists a rich literature on the impact of perceived task difficulty on performance and motivation. Yet, there is another topic that is closely related to the subject of the influence of perceived task difficulty that did not receive any attention in previous research - the influence of revealing the true difficulty of a task to the student. Specifically, we elaborate on the question of how a student's learning experience For many tasks, the task difficulty is unknown a priori. When a student (or worker) receives a certain task, her However, for a given task category (such as matchstick riddles), subjective estimate of the difficulty of that task has a strong it might be possible to build a data-driven AI that influence on her performance. Research has shown that perceptions predicts the difficulty level of a given task from that category. of task difficulty are strongly correlated to both Whether the development of such an AI is beneficial depends performance metrics such as the success rate and the solution on the influence of revealing task difficulty on the student's time and psychological factors that influence performance such performance. Therefore, understanding the influence of revealing as motivation, interest, self-efficacy and subjective task value task difficulty (in case that it is available) is particularly (attainment value, intrinsic value, utility value). Most commonly, the student's perception of the difficulty Whereas the influence of revealing the task difficulty on the of a given task is obtained implicitly from the description student's performance might be consistent (always positive or of the task, the background or setting in which the task was always negative), it might also be more complex.