Reflection on exam grades to improve calibration of secondary school students: a longitudinal study

Grades provide students with information about their level of performance. However, grades may also make students more aware of how well they have estimated their performance, their so-called calibration accuracy. This longitudinal quasi-experimental study, set in secondary education, examined how to increase students’ awareness of the accuracy of their grade estimates in order to improve their calibration accuracy. During an entire school year, students from year 1, 2, and 3 provided grade estimates after each of their French exams. Subsequently, when students received their grades, the level of reflection support on their earlier estimates was manipulated. The first group of students just received their grade, the second group had to calculate the difference between their estimate and the actual grade, and the third group also had to reflect on reasons for a possible mismatch. We expected that more reflection support would lead to more improvement in calibration accuracy. Results showed that providing grade estimates already improved calibration accuracy over the school year, regardless of level of reflection support. This finding shows that asking for grade estimates is an easy-to-implement way to improve calibration accuracy of students in secondary education

Learner control in animated multimedia instructions

The interactivity principle in multimedia learning states that giving learners control over pace and order of instructions decreases cognitive load and increases transfer performance. We tested this guideline by comparing a learner-paced instruction with a system-paced instruction. Time-on-task and interactive behavior were logged, and were also related to interest, prior knowledge, and cognitive involvement. We successfully replicated the interactivity principle in terms of better transfer. However, this coincided with a large increase in time-on-task. Also, large individual differences existed in the use of learner control options, which were mostly unrelated to the other variables. Thus, the benefits of introducing learner control in multimedia learning are at the expense of learning efficiency, and it remains unclear for whom the interactivity principle works best

The Effect of Testing on the Retention of Coherent and Incoherent Text Material

Research has shown that testing during learning can enhance the long-term retention of text material. In two experiments, we investigated the testing effect with a fill-in-the-blank test on the retention of text material. In Experiment 1, using a coherent text, we found no retention benefit of testing compared to a restudy (control) condition. In Experiment 2, text coherence was disrupted by scrambling the order of the sentences from the text. The material was subsequently presented as a list of facts as opposed to connected discourse. For the incoherent version of the text, testing slowed down the rate of forgetting compared to a restudy (control) condition. The results suggest that the connectedness of materials can play an important role in determining the magnitude of testing benefits for long-term retention. Testing with a completion test seems most beneficial for unconnected materials and less so for highly structured materials

Towards a framework for attention cueing in instructional animations: Guidelines for research and design

This paper examines the transferability of successful cueing approaches from text and static visualization research to animations. Theories of visual attention and learning as well as empirical evidence for the instructional effectiveness of attention cueing are reviewed and, based on Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning, a framework was developed for classifying three functions for cueing: (1) selection—cues guide attention to specific locations, (2) organization—cues emphasize structure, and (3) integration—cues explicate relations between and within elements. The framework was used to structure the discussion of studies on cueing in animations. It is concluded that attentional cues may facilitate the selection of information in animations and sometimes improve learning, whereas organizational and relational cueing requires more consideration on how to enhance understanding. Consequently, it is suggested to develop cues that work in animations rather than borrowing effective cues from static representations. Guidelines for future research on attention cueing in animations are presented

The modality of text in multimedia instruction: Refining the design guidelines. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Open University of the

modality and cueing 19 CHAPTER 3- A closer look at the modality effect in multimedia learning 3

Simultaneous and sequential presentation of realistic and schematic instructional dynamic visualizations

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of combining realistic and schematic dynamic visualizations of mitosis. Ninety-two students from four different biology classes were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. Participants in the simultaneous condition studied both a realistic and a schematic visualization of mitosis that were presented simultaneously; participants in the sequential condition studied these two visualizations sequentially; and participants in the schematic-only condition and the realistic-only condition studied only one of the visualizations. Afterwards, participants made a verbal and visual recognition test, and rated the difficulty and comprehensibility of the visualizations. The results showed that the conditions did not differ on verbal and visual recognition. Only on the schematic questions of the visual recognition test, the realistic-only condition scored significantly lower than the other three conditions. Also, no differences were found on the difficulty and comprehensibility ratings. It is concluded that studying multiple representations of a dynamic process is not necessarily better than studying only one representation

Reflection on exam grades to improve calibration of secondary school students: a longitudinal study

Grades provide students with information about their level of performance. However, grades may also make students more aware of how well they have estimated their performance, their so-called calibration accuracy. This longitudinal quasi-experimental study, set in secondary education, examined how to increase students’ awareness of the accuracy of their grade estimates in order to improve their calibration accuracy. During an entire school year, students from year 1, 2, and 3 provided grade estimates after each of their French exams. Subsequently, when students received their grades, the level of reflection support on their earlier estimates was manipulated. The first group of students just received their grade, the second group had to calculate the difference between their estimate and the actual grade, and the third group also had to reflect on reasons for a possible mismatch. We expected that more reflection support would lead to more improvement in calibration accuracy. Results showed that providing grade estimates already improved calibration accuracy over the school year, regardless of level of reflection support. This finding shows that asking for grade estimates is an easy-to-implement way to improve calibration accuracy of students in secondary education