EFFECTS OF VISUAL SIGNALING ON PRE-COLLEGE STUDENTS' ENGINEERING LEARNING PERFORMANCE AND ATTITUDES: PEER VERSUS ADULT PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS VERSUS ARROW SIGNALING

摘要

Multiple-representation learning environments have the potential for improving learning in science, math, and engineering. Providing students with multiple representations of the same concept or procedure can facilitate their learning process. But these environments can also cause cognitive overload when novice students try to comprehend and integrate these representations. A challenge presented by these learning environments is that each representation needs to be understood and mentally integrated with the other representations, which may pose heavy cognitive demands on novice students. Despite this challenge, instruction rarely includes methods aimed at supporting the processes of selecting, organizing, and integrating multiple representations during learning. Signaling encourages learners to engage in productive cognitive processing during learning, which includes selecting relevant steps, organizing them into a coherent mental structure, and integrating them with already existing knowledge about the topic. Signaling that is used for focusing attention and for highlighting specific locations can be effectively used to guide the process of selecting relevant information. Several studies investigating the effects of signaling in multimedia learning environments reported positive learning outcomes for conditions that used signaling compared to conditions that did not employ any signaling. Signaling can be done in various forms such as voice, text, arrows, or animated pedagogical agents.