Cognitive load theory and multimedia learning, task characteristics, and learning engagement: The current state of the art

Kirschner, F., Kester, L., & Corbalan, G. (2011). Cognitive load theory and multimedia learning, task characteristics, and learner engagement: The current state of the art. Computers in Human Behavior, 27, 1-4. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.05.003This special issue consists of 16 empirical papers, as well as a discussion based on the Third International Cognitive Load Theory Conference held at the Open Universiteit (Heerlen, The Netherlands) in 2009. All papers focus on improving instructional design from a cognitive load theory (CLT: Sweller, 1988; Sweller, Van Merriënboer, & Paas, 1998; Van Merriënboer & Sweller, 2005) perspective. They cover a wide variety of topics in which learner characteristics, tasks characteristics, and the interaction between both are studied in, new, innovative, but also traditional ways, thereby providing an overview of the current state of the art on CLT research. The overarching goal of all studies is to gain more understanding and insight into the optimal conditions under which learning can be successful, and students will be able to apply their acquired knowledge and skills in new or familiar problem solving situations. Together, the papers comprise three ways in which this overarching goal is reached: (1) by studying multimedia learning environments, (2) by studying different characteristics of a learning task and, (3) by studying how learners can be actively engaged in the learning process. Although, the research focus of most papers fit nicely within these research topics, some overlap is inevitable. The categorization has been made on the basis of the most prominent research focus and findings of each study

Online help-seeking in communities of practice

Interactive online help systems are considered to be a fruitful supplement to traditional IT helpdesks, which are often overloaded. They often comprise user-generated FAQ collections playing the role of technology-based conceptual artifacts. Two main questions arise: how the conceptual artifacts should be used, and which factors influence their acceptance in a community of practice (CoP). Firstly, this paper offers a theoretical frame and a usage scenario for technology-based conceptual artifacts against the theoretical background of the academic help-seeking and CoP approach. Each of the two approaches is extensively covered by psychological and educational research literature, however their combination is not yet sufficiently investigated. Secondly, the paper proposes a research model explaining the acceptance of conceptual artifacts. The model includes users’ expectations towards the artifact, perceived social influence and users’ roles in the CoP as predictors of artifact use intention and actual usage. A correlational study conducted in an academic software users’ CoP and involving structural equations modeling validates the model, suggesting thus a research line that is worth further pursuing. For educational practice, the study suggests three ways of supporting knowledge sharing in CoPs, i.e. use of technology-based conceptual artifacts, roles and division of labor, and purposeful communication in CoPs

Contemporary cognitive load theory research: The good, the bad and the ugly

Kirschner, P. A., Ayres, P., & Chandler, P. (2011). Contemporary cognitive load theory research: The good, the bad and the ugly. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(1), 99-105. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.06.025This paper reviews the 16 contributions of the special issue entitled Current Research in Cognitive Load Theory. Each paper is briefly summarized and some critical comments made. The overall collection is then discussed in terms of the positive contributions they make to the field of learning and instruction, and cognitive load theory in particular (the good), as well as problematical issues such as unresolved explanations and conflicting results (the bad) and the special case of measuring cognitive load (the ugly)

Why sketching may aid learning from science texts: contrasting sketching with written explanations

The goal of this study was to explore two accounts for why sketching during learning from text is helpful: (1) sketching acts like other constructive strategies such as self-explanation because it helps learners to identify relevant information and generate inferences; or (2) that in addition to these general effects, sketching has more specific benefits due to the pictorial representation that is constructed. Seventy-three seventh-graders (32 girls, M = 12.82 years) were first taught how to either create sketches or self-explain while studying science texts. During a subsequent learning phase, all students were asked to read an expository text about the greenhouse effect. Finally, they were asked to write down everything they remembered and then answer transfer questions. Strategy quality during learning was assessed as the number of key concepts that had either been sketched or mentioned in the self-explanations. The results showed that at an overall performance level there were only marginal group differences. However, a more in-depth analysis revealed that whereas no group differences emerged for students implementing either strategy poorly, the sketching group clearly outperformed the self-explanation group for students who applied the strategies with higher quality. Furthermore, higher sketching quality was strongly related to better learning outcomes. Thus, the study's results are more in line with the second account: Sketching can have a beneficial effect on learning above and beyond generating written explanations; at least, if well deployed

The Dynamics of Learning Engagement in Challenge-Based Online Learning

Vast amounts of educational data created by learners interacting with digital learning tools open up the opportunity to gain insights for improving education at a new level of evidence-based research into learning and teaching. This study is part of a research programme investigating the dynamics and impacts of learning engagement in a challenge-based online learning environment. Learning engagement is a multidimensional concept which includes an individual’s ability to behaviourally, cognitively, emotionally, and motivationally engage in an on-going learning process. Challenge-based learning gives significant freedom to the learner to decide what and when to engage and interact with digital learning materials. In light of previous empirical findings, we expect that learning engagement is positively related to learning performance in a challenge-based online learning environment. This study was based on data from the Careers Challenge platform, including transaction data from 8,951 students. Findings indicate that learning engagement in challenge-based online learning environments is, as expected, positively related to learning performance. Implications point toward the need for personalised and adaptive learning environments to be developed in order to cater for the individual needs of learners in challenge-based online learning environments

Drawing to Learn: Investigating the Role of Contributing Factors and Instructional Support for Learner-Generated Drawing

Learning with visual representations has been the focus of research for the past decades. A robust finding is the multimedia effect (Butcher, 2014), that is, learning with a combination of text and pictures is more beneficial than learning with text alone. Three cognitive processes are assumed to be important for multimedia learning: selecting and organizing information from text and pictures, as well as integrating this information in order to build a coherent mental model of the learning content (Mayer, 2009, 2014a). Although integration is crucial for effective multimedia learning, learners show only few attempts to integrate (Hegarty & Just, 1993; Mason et al., 2013, 2015; Scheiter & Eitel, 2015). One way to foster integration of verbal and pictorial information is to instruct learners to self-generate the visual representations. This strategy is described as learner-generated drawing (van Meter & Firetto, 2013, van Meter & Garner, 2013). Learner-generated drawing requires learners to construct external pictorial representations that include the key concepts and their relations while learning from verbal instruction (Leutner & Schmeck, 2014). Drawing has been shown to promote learning in terms of higher-order knowledge (for overviews see Ainsworth et al., 2011; van Meter & Firetto, 2013; van Meter & Garner, 2005). Benefits of drawing seem to depend on the availability and type of support during drawing construction (e.g., van Meter, 2001, van Meter et al., 2006, Schwamborn et al., 2010, Schmeck et al., 2014). Moreover, the quality of drawings constructed during drawing (i.e., the number of key concepts correctly incorporated into the drawings) is positively associated with learning outcomes; a finding that can be described as the prognostic drawing effect (Schwamborn et al., 2010). The main goal of the present thesis was to investigate which of three factors – generation, visualization, and externalization – mainly contributes to benefits of drawing. Second, it was examined how several boundary conditions would affect benefits of drawing – namely, the type of posttest, the quality of drawings constructed during learning, test delay as well as type of instructional support. Third, it was of interest how a drawing strategy instruction influences learners’ perceived difficulty of learning. The first study investigated the influence of generation and visualization. Drawing was compared with a multimedia condition, a summary condition, and a text-only condition. After learning, learning outcomes were assessed with an immediate and delayed posttest, whereby the time of assessment was manipulated within subjects. The results indicate that visualization is the factor contributing most to benefits of drawing. Because the results regarding time of testing likely were confounded with benefits of retrieval practice (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006), time of testing was included as a between-subjects factor in the second study. The second study examined the influence of generation and externalization on benefits of drawing. To this end, drawing was compared with an observation condition and a mental imagery condition. The results of the first study were replicated regarding the influence of an external pictorial representation being the main contributing factor to benefits of drawing. Moreover, it seems that drawing does not constitute a desirable difficulty (Bjork & Bjork, 2011; Bjork, 1994). As expected, the results showed that the size of the prognostic drawing effects depends on the type of posttest in that it was larger for assessments of higher-order knowledge than for assessments of lower-order knowledge. Additionally, the results indicate that free-hand drawing left learners with less cognitive resources available to engage in meaningful learning. The third study investigated which type of instructional support is most effective in order to help learners benefit more from constructing drawings. To this end, a no-support drawing condition was contrasted to a low-support condition, a high-support condition, and a text-only control condition. The findings indicate that neither reducing the requirement to reason about irrelevant elements of the drawings alone, nor reducing the need to reason about the visual appearance of any element seemed to influence learning beyond an unsupported drawing effect. Moreover, instructional support increased rather than decreased cognitive demands associated with managing the drawing process. Drawing quality was positively associated with learning outcomes; however, the prognostic drawing effect was not larger for assessments of higher-order knowledge than for assessments of lower-order knowledge. In conclusion, benefits of drawing seem to stem mainly from externalizing a visualization that drawing requires, rather than the actual generation of the drawing. Accordingly, recent theoretical frameworks of drawing (e.g., the CMDC; van Meter & Firetto, 2013) may overemphasize the role of generation. Thus, the results of previous studies comparing a drawing group to a non-drawing control group might be interpreted differently. Further research is needed to get more insight on boundary conditions of drawing including long-term effects, the influence of the type of posttest on the prognostic drawing effect, and the design of beneficial instructional support, as well as the influence of perceived difficulty for learner-generated drawing. Moreover, boundary conditions of multimedia learning could also affect benefits of learner-generated drawing and should be considered in future studies

Examining the influence of expertise on the effectiveness of diagramming and summarising when studying scientific materials

A 2 (learning strategies: diagram vs. summary) × 2 (levels of expertise: low vs. high) experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of using diagrams to writing summaries for students given biological information to learn and who possessed different levels of expertise in that topic area. A main effect of learning strategy used on number of idea units encoded (in diagrams or summaries) was found: drawing diagrams was superior to writing summaries. However, no interaction effect between learning strategies and expertise was found. An examination of students’ subjective ratings of cognitive load revealed that those with low expertise reported higher levels of cognitive load when constructing diagrams. These findings suggest that using diagrams is effective for identifying and encoding important information when learning, but that it would be helpful to provide guidance about diagram use particularly to students who are novices in the topic area to reduce cognitive load

Applying TSSL in database schema modeling: visualizing the syntax of gradual transitions

Since database conceptual modeling is a complex cognitive activity, finding an appropriate pedagogy to deliver the topic to novice database designers is a challenge for Information Systems (IS) educators. The four-level TSSL model that is known in the area of human-computer interactions (HCI) is used to explain and demonstrate how instructional design can minimize extraneous cognitive load in the conceptual modeling task of designing a database schema. The instructional design approach puts focus on the syntactic level of TSSL, to explain how visualizing gradual transitions between hierarchic levels of the schema is effective in database modeling. The current work demonstrates the approach, and at the next phase we plan to experimentally test the effectiveness of the approach by comparing performance and attitudes of students who are exposed to emphasizing the syntax of the gradual transitions in schema structure to those who are not exposed to itPeer Reviewe