EdTechDev

developing educational technology

Recent Sightings

These are from my bookmarks on del.icio.us:

April 13, 2008 Posted by | children, computers, development, edtech, opensource, research, simulations, technology | Comments Off

Reconsidering Cognitive Load Theory

Another item has been added to the debate between cognitive load theory, direct instruction, and worked examples on one side, and inquiry learning, problem-based learning, and game-based learning on the other (which I have covered before here and here). Wolfgang Schnotz and Christian Kürschner have published an article in Educational Psychology Review entitled “A Reconsideration of Cognitive Load Theory.” I’m afraid the full text is not available without a subscription at the moment. Schnotz looks at some of the anomalies and contradictions in cognitive load theory. Is more cognitive load good or bad for learning? Well it turns out sometimes it is good (germane) and sometimes not. When to tell which from which is one source of problems with cognitive load theory. There other articles also that are problematic for cognitive load theory and for the advocation of using pre-worked out examples over inquiry-based approaches. A few that come to mind include:

  • Miller, C. S., Lehman, J. F. and Koedinger, K. R. (1999). Goals and Learning in Microworlds. Cognitive Science, 23, 305-336.
  • D. Charney, L. Reder, and G. W. Kusbit, “Goal setting and procedure selection in acquiring computer skills:
    A comparison of tutorials, problem solving and learner exploration,” Cognition and Instruction, vol. 7, no.
    4, pp. 323–342, 1990.
  • And recent work by John Black (AERA 2006, ICLS 2006), Richard Lowe, and myself (AERA 2007) that show that interactive or controllable animations and simulations, while requiring more “cognitive load,” are much more effective for learning than passive animations. Richard Lowe and Wolfgang Schnotz also have a book due out soon entitled Learning with Animation: Research Implications for Design.

September 20, 2007 Posted by | learning sciences, research, simulations, theory | Comments Off

New Book: The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education

My colleagues at USU Brett Shelton and David Wiley have published their edited volume entitled The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education. A pdf of the book is also available. You might also be interested in the L2TD project (Learning about Learning-Technology-Design), which also has a book coming out soon.

August 2, 2007 Posted by | edtech, games, research, simulations | Comments Off

More Educational Research Related Blogs

I posted earlier a list of a few blogs that discuss educational research every now and then. Since then the Education Research Report blog has been discontinued as a free resource. Here are a few more related blogs, as well as some educational gaming/simulation blogs:

Educational Gaming/Simulation blogs:

February 28, 2007 Posted by | education, games, research, simulations | 1 Comment

AERA, SIGCSE, ICER Conference Proceedings Online

Haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been criss-crossing the country interviewing for ed tech jobs. I’ll write more on that soon.

Some conference proceedings and papers have been made available online recently, such as the AERA 2007 conference program. Their website is quite horrible I’m afraid. Don’t use the back button or multiple browser windows or tabs.

At AERA I’ll be discussing my initial research on students learning with an animated AC circuit simulation, as measured by a test of their conceptual knowledge (a “concept inventory”). Here is the proposal, which for anonymizing purposes has no references, so here is a big reference list. I’ll post a link to the full paper when the conference is closer, and hopefully a link to the simulation as well. Until then I’m mainly busy continuing to re-program it as well as writing a journal article about earlier research on AC circuit (mis)conceptions with my former colleagues.

The SIGCSE conference (computer science education) is occurring next week near Cincinnati. Here are the papers and topics being presented there. As always Mark Guzdial is very involved in that conference, along with the ICER 2007 conference (International Computing Education Research) in Atlanta later this year. The papers from last year’s ICER 2006 conference are online. I am not a CS person or really interested in CS education, but rather making it easier for hobbyists and beginners to develop interactive educational software. So I think there is a close connection to what they are doing, but actually both the SIGCSE and ICER seem to be almost solely about formal CS education in classrooms.

I posted earlier about all the ed tech related conferences coming up in 2007. Here are a few interesting ones:

I have a whole rant about the inefficacy and costliness of conferences, but I’ll spare you.

February 28, 2007 Posted by | conferences, education, research, simulations | Comments Off

Animations vs. Diagrams

Are animations better than a series of static diagrams or pictures for helping someone understand something such as how some system behaves and functions? Will Thalheimer summarizes some of this work, but more in-depth papers and reviews are listed below. Most studies have shown that there is not much advantage overall of animations over well-designed diagrams, but I’d say when designing real educational software, animations can be very useful. For one thing, the reviews discount studies where the animation provided more information than the diagram. For a designer, however, this is not a confound but rather an advantage, and sometimes the extra information is inevitable. Consider for example an electrical circuit diagram which provides no explicit information about the behavior of current at all vs. an animated simulation. Most studies also do not give the learners control over the pacing of the animation (as in an animated simulation). As Richard Lowe’s work (below) shows, “user-controllable” diagrams/animations can be more effective. And in the quote from the Tversky paper below, I highlight their qualification about user control and interactivity:

  • Animation: Can it facilitate? (pdf) review by Barbara Tversky, Morrison, and Betrancourt. A quote:

    “Animations of events may be ineffective because animations violate the second principle of good graphics, the Apprehension Principle, according to which graphics shouldbe accurately perceived and appropriately conceived. Animations are often too complex or too fast to be accurately perceived. Moreover, many continuous events are conceived of as sequences of discrete steps. Judicious use of interactivity may overcome both these disadvantages.”

  • See also the chapters by Betrancourt and Mary Hegarty in the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, edited by Richard Mayer.
  • User-Controllable Animated Diagrams: The Solution for Learning Dynamic Content? (full text requires subscription) and Animation and learning: Value for money? – papers on user control and animations by Richard Lowe.
  • Also, it’s not an either/or choice. You can work with animations/simulations and then diagrams. Letting students experience a more open-ended learning environment like a simulation before a lecture or text is more effective. [1][2]

January 8, 2007 Posted by | research, simulations | Comments Off

Ed Tech Year in Review, and Conferences in 2007

Clayton Wright has created a list of many of the ed tech related conferences coming up in 2007. See the word document at the bottom of the page. Some others not mentioned are listed here (sorry, requires a free subscription), including ICLS (2008), Frontiers in Education, SIGCSE, Visualization in Science and Education, Engineering Interactive Systems, Enactive, Physics Education Research Conference, Multimedia in Physics Teaching and Learning, the K12 Online Conference, and others.

Educational technology news:

December 28, 2006 Posted by | conferences, edtech, games, simulations | Comments Off

Dramatic example of discovery learning

Here is a rather dramatic example of unguided (or self-guided) discovery learning. See also this PBS video feature on the same story. A man in India put a computer with net access in a wall next to an alley so that poor children could use it. They developed quite a fluency in its use. The man nudged them once, showing them that the computer could play music, too. But for classroom purposes, I was also interested in another little experiment he did with classroom students. The part quoted from the article is in italics below:

Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, “What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?” He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, “Look here guys. I have a little problem for you.” They read the questions and said they didn’t understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, “Here’s a terminal. I’ll give you two hours to find the answers.”

Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.

They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn’t mean much. But I said to him, “Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject.” So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, “They don’t know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn’t know.”

That’s not a wow for the children, it’s a wow for the Internet. It shows you what it’s capable of. The slum children don’t have physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is not what’s important. What is important is infrastructure and access … The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.

And I would mention now, based on the earlier papers I cited in my last post, if the teacher followed up with the children on a lesson about viscosity, they would learn even more. That is what has been variously termed a teachable moment, or a time for telling. The students explored on their own and learned a great deal, but still had many questions and areas they did not understand, plus areas they may have understood incorrectly. The teacher at that point could help fill in the gaps, so to speak.

October 2, 2006 Posted by | research, simulations, theory | Comments Off

Links + direct instruction vs. discovery learning

  • Here’s a post at IGN about the use of videogames in education.
  • Abdulaziz Ghuloum has written a tutorial about writing your own compiler. The difference is that it is a progressive tutorial rather than incremental. You don’t have to wait until the end before you can actually try the compiler out.

Richard Hake, one of the creators of the well-known Force Concept Inventory for assessing physics understanding, posts a lot of very informative material to the physlrnr, phys-l, and math-teach lists. Lately there was a re-hash again over a research article by Klahr & Nigem about direct instruction vs. discovery learning. In a typical unfairly designed psych experiment, Klahr compared direct instruction to a group in which students were left to fend completely on their own (unguided discovery). Students fared better in the direct instruction condition (although actually they had a discovery activity before the instruction began as well). People in the government and people who favor traditional schooling approaches jumped on that article as proof that direct instruction is best.

Here is Hake’s response to it from back in 2004. See the archives of the above lists for more recent discussions. I would also add some other references that counter the mis-interpretation of Klahr’s study, and clarify when and how direct instruction can be useful. There is an article entitled “A time for telling” from 1998 by John Bransford in the journal Cognition & Instruction. Also another 1991 article showed that giving students a discovery-learning experience before a lecture made for much better learning gains:

Brant, G., Hooper, E., & Sugrue, B. (1991). Which comes first: The simulation or the lecture? Journal of Educational Computing Research, 7(4), 469-481.

Here’s a related paragraph from a review I wrote a few years ago:

Simulation before instruction. A number of studies have found advantages to using simulations in sequence with other forms of instruction such as a lecture, but not necessarily during a lecture as earlier examples demonstrated (Thomas & Hooper, 1991). This makes sense when again realizing that simulations are environments that do not provide information to students so much as they require information from students to be used effectively. Particularly effective is allowing students to use a simulation before a lecture or other activity (Brant, Hooper, & Sugrue, 1991). Even though students may or may not fully understand the model underlying the simulation they use, after exploring the environment they may have formed questions or strategies for learning about the domain. So even when a simulation is not completely understandable to a student, it may engender a preparedness for future learning, and the students may attend differently to a subsequent lecture or other learning activity.

Here are some more general paragraphs from earlier in the review:

In a large-scale analysis of mathematics classrooms, Harold Wenglinsky found higher student achievement in classrooms using computers for simulation and data exploration activities. In contrast, achievement scores actually declined by six tenths of a year in eighth-grade classrooms in which computers were used for decontextualized drill activities instead of simulations (Wenglinsky, 1998).

Students learn more than just facts when using computer simulations. Njoo and de Jong (1993) have found that the educational benefits of simulations are revealed more in tests of intuitive knowledge, such as reasoning about “what if” scenarios, rather than tests of more factual knowledge. Similarly, Thomas and Hooper (1991) concluded in a review of research that the use of simulations is more effective when the educational goal is for students to transfer and apply knowledge to real-world problems rather than memorize facts or procedures. This is not as surprising when considering that the primary design principle of simulations, fidelity, is designed to lower the amount of work needed to transfer one’s knowledge to the actual system it is modeling.

October 2, 2006 Posted by | research, simulations, theory | Comments Off

   

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