Instructional Design for Advanced Learners: Establishing Connections between the Theoretical Frameworks of Cognitive Load and Deliberate Practice

Cognitive load theory (CLT) has been successful in identifying instructional formats that are more effective and efficient than conventional problem solving in the initial, novice phase of skill acquisition. However, recent findings regarding the “expertise reversal effect” have begun to stimulate cognitive load theorists to broaden their horizon to the question of how instructional design should be altered as a learner's knowledge increases. To answer this question, it is important to understand how expertise is acquired and what fosters its development. Expert performance research, and, in particular, the theoretical framework of deliberate practice have given us a better understanding of the principles and activities that are essential in order to excel in a domain. This article explores how these activities and principles can be used to design instructional formats based on CLT for higher levels of skills mastery. The value of these formats for e-learning environments in which learning tasks can be adaptively selected on the basis of online assessments of the learner's level of expertise is discussed

Effects of Task Experience and Layout on Learning from Text and Pictures with or without Unnecessary Picture Descriptions

The presentation of extraneous (i.e., irrelevant or unnecessary) information may hamper learning with multimedia. The present study examined whether people can learn to ignore unnecessary information with increasing experience with the task and whether this depends on the layout of that information. In two experiments, participants learned about the process of mitosis from a multimedia slideshow, with each slide presenting a combination of expository text and a picture on one of the stages in the process. Slides either contained no unnecessary text (control condition) or unnecessary text (i.e., merely describing the picture) either integrated in the picture (integrated condition) or presented underneath the picture (separated condition). Knowledge about the studied mitosis phase was tested immediately after each slide using a cloze test. Across Experiments 1 and 2, we did not find a reliable negative effect of the unnecessary text on cloze test performance. As a result, the question of whether task experience would reduce or eliminate that negative effect could not be answered. The eye movement data did confirm, however, that participants attended less to the unnecessary information with increasing task experience, suggesting that students can adapt their study strategy and learn to ignore unnecessary information

Inverse Classification for Comparison-based Interpretability in Machine Learning

In the context of post-hoc interpretability, this paper addresses the task of explaining the prediction of a classifier, considering the case where no information is available, neither on the classifier itself, nor on the processed data (neither the training nor the test data). It proposes an instance-based approach whose principle consists in determining the minimal changes needed to alter a prediction: given a data point whose classification must be explained, the proposed method consists in identifying a close neighbour classified differently, where the closeness definition integrates a sparsity constraint. This principle is implemented using observation generation in the Growing Spheres algorithm. Experimental results on two datasets illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach that can be used to gain knowledge about the classifier.Comment: preprin

Testing After Worked Example Study Does Not Enhance Delayed Problem-Solving Performance Compared to Restudy

Four experiments investigated whether the testing effect also applies to the acquisition of problem-solving skills from worked examples. Experiment 1 (n = 120) showed no beneficial effects of testing consisting of isomorphic problem solving or example recall on final test performance, which consisted of isomorphic problem solving, compared to continued study of isomorphic examples. Experiment 2 (n = 124) showed no beneficial effects of testing consisting of identical problem solving compared to restudying an identical example. Interestingly, participants who took both an immediate and a delayed final test outperformed those taking only a delayed test. This finding suggested that testing might become beneficial for retention but only after a certain level of schema acquisition has taken place through restudying several examples. However, experiment 2 had no control condition restudying examples instead of taking the immediate test. Experiment 3 (n = 129) included such a restudy condition, and there was no evidence that testing after studying four examples was more effective for

Transmission and dose–response experiments for social animals: a reappraisal of the colonization biology of Campylobacter jejuni in chickens

Dose-response experiments characterize the relationship between infectious agents and their hosts. These experiments are routinely used to estimate the minimum effective infectious dose for an infectious agent, which is most commonly characterized by the dose at which 50 per cent of challenged hosts become infected-the ID(50). In turn, the ID(50) is often used to compare between different agents and quantify the effect of treatment regimes. The statistical analysis of dose-response data typically makes the assumption that hosts within a given dose group are independent. For social animals, in particular avian species, hosts are routinely housed together in groups during experimental studies. For experiments with non-infectious agents, this poses no practical or theoretical problems. However, transmission of infectious agents between co-housed animals will modify the observed dose-response relationship with implications for the estimation of the ID(50) and the comparison between different agents and treatments. We derive a simple correction to the likelihood for standard dose-response models that allows us to estimate dose-response and transmission parameters simultaneously. We use this model to show that: transmission between co-housed animals reduces the apparent value of the ID(50) and increases the variability between replicates leading to a distinctive all-or-nothing response; in terms of the total number of animals used, individual housing is always the most efficient experimental design for ascertaining dose-response relationships; estimates of transmission from previously published experimental data for Campylobacter spp. in chickens suggest that considerable transmission occurred, greatly increasing the uncertainty in the estimates of dose-response parameters reported in the literature. Furthermore, we demonstrate that accounting for transmission in the analysis of dose-response data for Campylobacter spp. challenges our current understanding of the differing response of chickens with respect to host-age and in vivo passage of bacteria. Our findings suggest that the age-dependence of transmissibility between hosts-rather than their susceptibility to colonization-is the mechanism behind the 'lag-phase' reported in commercial flocks, which are typically found to be Campylobacter free for the first 14-21 days of life.A.J.K.C. is funded by DEFRA grant PU/T/WL/07/46 - SE3230, sponsored by the Veterinary Laboratories Agency. This research was developed during an earlier project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council/Defra Government Partnership Award, grants BB/500852/1 and BB/500936/1

Holographic analysis of diffraction structure factors

We combine the theory of inside-source/inside-detector x-ray fluorescence holography and Kossel lines/x ray standing waves in kinematic approximation to directly obtain the phases of the diffraction structure factors. The influence of Kossel lines and standing waves on holography is also discussed. We obtain partial phase determination from experimental data obtaining the sign of the real part of the structure factor for several reciprocal lattice vectors of a vanadium crystal.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitte

Effects of pointing gestures on memory for (in)congruent stimuli in children and young adults.

We investigated whether finger pointing toward picture locations can be used as an external cognitive control tool to guide attention and compensate for the immature cognitive control functions in children compared with young adults. Item and source memory performance was compared for picture-location pairs that were either semantically congruent (e.g., a cloud presented at the upper half of the screen) or incongruent (e.g., a cloud presented at the lower part of the screen). Contrary to our expectations, pointing had an adverse eff

Fostering clinical reasoning in physiotherapy: Comparing the effects of concept map study and concept map completion after example study in novice and advanced learners

Background: Health profession learners can foster clinical reasoning by studying worked examples presenting fully worked out solutions to a clinical problem. It is possible to improve the learning effect of these worked examples by combining them with other learning activities based on con

Differential Photoelectron Holography: A New Approach for Three-Dimensional Atomic Imaging

We propose differential holography as a method to overcome the long-standing forward-scattering problem in photoelectron holography and related techniques for the three-dimensional imaging of atoms. Atomic images reconstructed from experimental and theoretical Cu 3p holograms from Cu(001) demonstrate that this method suppresses strong forward-scattering effects so as to yield more accurate three-dimensional images of side- and back-scattering atoms.Comment: revtex, 4 pages, 2 figure