The technique of drawing to learn has received increasing attention in recent years. In this article, we will present distinct purposes for using drawing that are based on active, constructive, and ...interactive forms of engagement. In doing so, we hope to show that drawing to learn should be widely used and that there is good evidence to support its use in many situations. To make the most of these distinct purposes, teachers should note that what learners draw matters and that this needs to be assessed in relation to task demands. Drawing to learn will also require learners to be supported to engage meaningfully in ways that are matched to these pedagogical purposes.
Conducting experiments fosters conceptual understanding in science education. In various studies, combinations of real (hands-on) and virtual (computer-simulated) experiments have been shown to be ...especially helpful for gaining conceptual understanding. The present systematic review, based on 42 experimental studies, focuses on the following: (1) What is the relative effectiveness of combining real and virtual experiments compared with a single type of experimentation? (2) Which sequence of real and virtual experiments is most effective? The results indicate that (1) in most cases combinations of real and virtual experiments promote conceptual understanding better than a single type of experimentation, and (2) there is no evidence for the superiority of a particular sequence. We conclude that for combining real and virtual experiments, apart from the individual affordances and the learning objectives of the different experiment types, especially their specific function for the learning task must be considered.
This special issue comprises a set of six papers, in which studies are presented that use eye tracking to analyse multimedia learning processes in detail. Most of the papers focus on the effects on ...visual attention of animations with different design features such as spoken vs. written text, different kinds of cues, or different presentation speeds. Two contributions concern effects of learner characteristics (prior knowledge) on visual attention when learning with video and complex graphics. In addition, in some papers eye tracking is not only used as a process measure in itself, but also as input for verbal reports (i.e., cued retrospective reporting). In the two commentaries, the contributions are discussed from a multimedia learning perspective and an eye tracking perspective, by prominent researchers in those fields. Together, the contributions to this issue give an overview of the various possibilities eye tracking opens up for research on multimedia learning and instruction.
In this experiment, we examined whether linguistic text complexity affects effects of explaining modality on students’ learning. Students (N = 115) read a high-complex and a low-complex text. ...Additionally, they generated a written or an oral explanation to a fictious peer. A control group of students retrieved the content. For the low-complex text, we found no significant differences between conditions. For the high-complex text, oral explaining yielded better comprehension than writing explanations. The retrieval condition showed the lowest performance. Mediation analyses revealed that the effect of explaining modality while learning from the high-complex text was mediated by the personal references and the comprehensiveness of the generated explanations. Our findings suggest that the effect of explaining modality emerges when students are required to learn from difficult texts. Furthermore, they show that oral explaining is effective as, likely due to increases of social presence, it triggers distinct generative processes during explaining.
•Explaining modality (written vs. oral) showed to inconsistently affect learning.•We tested whether explaining modality depends on text complexity.•Oral explaining was best for high-complex, but not for low-complex texts.•Personal references and the comprehensiveness of explanations were crucial for learning.
A central factor in research guided by the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the mental effort people invest in performing a task. Mental effort is commonly assessed by asking people to report their ...effort throughout performing, learning, or problem-solving tasks. Although this measurement is considered reliable and valid in CLT research, metacognitive research provides robust evidence that self-appraisals of performance are often biased. In this review, we consider the possibility that mental effort appraisals may also be biased. In particular, we review signs for covariations and mismatches between subjective and objective measures of effort. Our review suggests that subjective and most objective effort measures appear reliable and valid when evaluated in isolation, because they discriminate among tasks of varying complexity. However, not much is known about their mutual correspondence—that is, whether subjective measures covariate with objective measures. Moreover, there is evidence that people utilize heuristic cues when appraising their effort, similar to utilization of heuristic cues underlying metacognitive appraisals of performance. These cues are identified by exposing biases—mismatch in effects of cue variations on appraisals and performance. The review concludes with a research agenda in which we suggest applying the well-established methodologies for studying biases in self-appraisals of performance in metacognitive research to investigating effort appraisals. One promising method could be to determine the covariation of effort appraisals and objective effort measures as an indicator of the resolution of effort appraisals.
Writing explanations has demonstrated to be less effective than providing oral explanations, as writing triggers less amounts of perceived social presence during explaining. In this study, we ...investigated whether increasing social presence during writing explanations would aid learning. University students (N = 137) read an instructional text about immunology; their subsequent task depended on experimental condition. Students either explained the contents to a fictitious peer orally, wrote their explanations in a text editor, or wrote them in a messenger chat, which was assumed to induce higher levels of social presence. A control group retrieved the material. Surprisingly, we did not obtain any differences in learning outcomes between experimental conditions. Interestingly, explaining was more effortful, enjoyable, and interesting than retrieving. This study shows that solely inducing social presence does not improve learning from writing explanations. More importantly, the findings underscore the importance of cognitive and motivational conditions during learning activities.
Tasks with a complex, dynamic visual component require not only the acquisition of conceptual/procedural but also of perceptual/attentional skills. This study examined expertise differences in ...perceiving and interpreting complex, dynamic visual stimuli on a performance and on a process level, including perceptual and conceptual strategies. Performance, eye movement, and verbal report data were obtained from seven experts and 14 novices. Results show that experts compared to novices attend more to relevant aspects of the stimulus, use more heterogeneous task approaches, and use knowledge-based shortcuts. Implications for instructional design for the acquisition of perceptual skills are discussed.
Guided inquiry learning is an effective method for learning about scientific concepts. The present study investigated the effects of combining video modeling (VM) examples and metacognitive prompts ...on university students’ (
N
= 127) scientific reasoning and self-regulation during inquiry learning. We compared the effects of watching VM examples combined with prompts (VMP) to watching VM examples only, and to unguided inquiry (control) in a training and a transfer task. Dependent variables were scientific reasoning ability, hypothesis and argumentation quality, and scientific reasoning and self-regulation processes. Participants in the VMP and VM conditions had higher hypothesis and argumentation quality in the training task and higher hypothesis quality in the transfer task compared to the control group. There was no added benefit of the prompts. Screen captures and think aloud protocols during the two tasks served to obtain insights into students’ scientific reasoning and self-regulation processes. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) and process mining were used to model the co-occurrence and sequences of these processes. The ENA identified stronger co-occurrences between scientific reasoning and self-regulation processes in the two VM conditions compared to the control condition. Process mining revealed that in the VM conditions these processes occurred in unique sequences and that self-regulation processes had many self-loops. Our findings show that video modeling examples are a promising instructional method for supporting inquiry learning on both the process and the learning outcomes level.
Diagnosing orthopantomograms (OPTs: panoramic radiographs) is an essential skill dentistry students acquire during university training. While prior research described experts' visual search behavior ...in radiology as global-to-focal for chest radiographs and mammography, generalizability to a hybrid search task in OPTs (i.e., searching for multiple, diverse anomalies) remains unclear. Addressing this gap, this study investigated visual search of N = 107 dentistry students while they were diagnosing anomalies in OPTs. Following a global-to-focal expert model, we hypothesized that students would use many, short fixations representing global search in earlier stages, and few, long fixations representing focal search in later stages. Furthermore, pupil dilation and mean fixation duration served as cognitive load measures. We hypothesized that later stages would be characterized by elaboration and a reflective search strategy, leading to higher cognitive load being associated with higher diagnostic performance in late compared to earlier stages. In line with the first hypothesis, students' visual search comprised of a three-stage process that grew increasingly focal in terms of the number of fixations and anomalies fixated. Contrary to the second hypothesis, mean fixation duration during anomaly fixations was positively associated with diagnostic performance across all stages. As OPTs greatly varied in how difficult it was to identify the anomalies contained therein, OPTs with above-average difficulty were sampled for exploratory analysis. Pupil dilation predicted diagnostic performance for difficult OPTs, possibly capturing elaborative cognitive processes and cognitive load compared to mean fixation duration. A visual analysis of fine-grained time slices indicated large cognitive load differences towards the end of trials, showcasing a richness-resolution-trade-off in data sampling crucial for future studies using time-slicing of eye tracking data.
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