Journal: Journal of Educational Psychology

Abbreviation

J. educ. psychol.

Publisher

American Psychological Association

Journal Volumes

ISSN

0022-0663
1939-2176

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Publications 1 - 10 of 17
  • What Skills Related to the Control-of-Variables Strategy Need to Be Taught, and Who Gains Most? Differential Effects of a Training Intervention
    Item type: Journal Article
    Peteranderl, Sonja; Edelsbrunner, Peter; Deiglmayr, Anne; et al. (2023)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
    Building on rich training literature, we examined which skills constituting the control-of-variables strategy (CVS) benefit from a comprehensive training, and which develop similarly during content-focused inquiry at ages 10-12. In addition, we examined whether prior knowledge, reasoning abilities, and reading comprehension explain variation in intervention effects. In a within-classroom, controlled field-experiment, half of N = 618 children from schools located in the German-speaking part of Switzerland were randomly assigned to a training on the CVS, and the other half to an active control group engaging in content-focused inquiry. Mixed-effects models revealed that the CVS training improved children's skills in planning controlled experiments and understanding the indeterminacy of confounded experiments, whereas it did not show specific effects on children's skills in identifying and interpreting controlled experiments. Children with better reasoning abilities and reading comprehension showed the strongest intervention effects on the more difficult skills. The general and differential effects of training remained mostly stable after a period of 6 months. More basic CVS skills seem to develop without targeted training, whereas more advanced ones benefit most from training that meets learners' preconditions.
  • Successful learning with multiple graphical representations and self-explanation prompts
    Item type: Journal Article
    Rau, Martina; Aleven, Vincent; Rummel, Nikol (2015)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
    Research shows that multiple external representations can significantly enhance students’ learning. Most of this research has focused on learning with text and 1 additional graphical representation. However, real instructional materials often employ multiple graphical representations (MGRs) in addition to text. An important open question is whether the use of MGRs leads to better learning than a single graphical representation (SGR) when the MGRs are presented separately, 1-by-1 across consecutive problems, accompanied by text and numbers. A further question is whether providing support for students to relate the different representations to the key concepts that they depict can enhance their benefit from MGRs. We investigated these questions in 2 classroom experiments that involved problem solving practice with an intelligent tutoring system for fractions. Based on 112 sixth-grade students, Experiment 1 investigated whether MGRs lead to better learning outcomes than 1 commonly used SGR, and whether this effect can be enhanced by prompting students to self-explain key concepts depicted by the graphical representations. Based on 152 fourth- and fifth-grade students, Experiment 2 investigated whether the advantage of MGRs depends on the specific representation chosen for the SGR condition because prior research suggests that some SGRs might promote learning more than others. Both experiments demonstrate that MGRs lead to better conceptual learning than an SGR, provided that students are supported in relating graphical representations to key concepts. We extend research on multiple external representations by demonstrating that MGRs (presented in addition to text and 1-by-1 across consecutive problems) can enhance learning.
  • Differential benefits of explicit failure-driven and success-driven scaffolding in problem-solving prior to instruction
    Item type: Journal Article
    Sinha, Tanmay; Kapur, Manu; West, Robert; et al. (2021)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
    Unscaffolded problem-solving before receiving instruction can give students opportunities to entertain their exploratory hypotheses at the expense of experiencing initial failures. Prior literature has argued for the efficacy of such preparatory activities in preparing students to learn from instruction. Despite growing understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms, the pedagogical value of success or failure in initial problem-solving attempts is still unclear. We do not know yet whether some ways of succeeding or failing are more efficacious than others. We report empirical evidence from a classroom intervention (N = 221), where we designed scaffolds to explicitly push student problem-solving toward success via structuring, but also toward failure via problematizing. Our rationale for explicit failure scaffolding was rooted in facilitating problem-space exploration. We subsequently compared the differential preparatory effects of success-driven and failure-driven problem-solving on learning from follow-up instruction. Results suggested that failure-driven scaffolding (nudging students to generate suboptimal solutions) and success-driven scaffolding (nudging students to generate optimal solutions by giving them heuristics with low specificity) had similar outcomes on posttest assessments of conceptual understanding. Students exposed to failure-driven scaffolding, however, demonstrated higher quality of constructive reasoning. These trends were more salient for the learning concept with greater difficulty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
  • When Problem-Solving Followed by Instruction Is Superior to the Traditional Tell-and-Practice Sequence
    Item type: Journal Article
    Schalk, Lennart; Schumacher, Ralph; Barth, Armin; et al. (2018)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
  • Sequencing support for sense making and perceptual induction of connections among multiple visual representations
    Item type: Journal Article
    Rau, Martina (2018)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
    Making connections among multiple visual representations is key to students’ learning. This article considers two learning processes involved in connection making: explicit sense making of connections and implicit perceptual induction of connections. Instructional interventions support these processes via different problem types: sense-making problems ask students to verbally explain connections, whereas perceptual-induction problems ask students to quickly categorize numerous representations. Prior research shows that sense-making and perceptual-induction problems enhance students’ learning of domain knowledge—but only if both problem types are combined. Thus, one must ask whether the ability to make sense of connections enhances students’ ability to perceptually induce connections, or vice versa, and, consequently, which problem type students should receive first. This article investigates these questions in the context of undergraduate chemistry. Three experiments with 691 students compare instructional sequences that provide sense-making problems first or perceptual-induction problems first. Effects are assessed on problem-solving performance during the intervention and on chemistry knowledge learning gains after the intervention. Causal path analyses test whether working on sense-making problems first enhances (or impedes) students’ learning from subsequent perceptual-induction problems and vice versa. Results show that sequence interacts with prior chemistry knowledge: High prior-knowledge students show higher learning gains if they receive sense-making problems first. Low-prior-knowledge students show higher learning gains if they receive perceptual-induction problems first. Causal path analyses suggest that sense-making problems enhance students’ learning from subsequent perceptual-induction problems more so than the other way around. However, costs of switching between problem types interfere with low-prior-knowledge students’ ability to take advantage of this effect.
  • Why does a large ship of iron float?
    Item type: Journal Article
    Hardy, Ilonca; Jonen, Angela; Möller, Kornelia; et al. (2006)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
  • Cognitive Benefits and Costs of Bilingualism in Elementary School Students
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kempert, Sebastian; Saalbach, Henrik; Hardy, Ilonca (2011)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
  • Under which conditions are physical versus virtual representations effective? Contrasting conceptual and embodied mechanisms of learning.
    Item type: Journal Article
    Rau, Martina; Herder, Tiffany (2021)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
    Abundant prior research has compared effects of physical and virtual manipulatives on students’ conceptual learning. However, most prior research has been based on conceptual salience theory; that is, it has explained mode effects by the manipulative’s capability to draw students’ attention to conceptually relevant (visual or haptic) features. Yet, research based on embodied schema theory suggests that other mechanisms, which do not rely on students’ explicit attention to specific features, also affect students’ learning from manipulatives. This paper presents a study that contrasts predictions by different theoretical perspectives by comparing multiple versions of physical and virtual manipulatives. Specifically, we conducted a lab experiment with 119 undergraduate students who learned about 3 concepts related to atomic structure using 1 of 4 versions of energy diagram manipulatives. The 4 versions varied the representation mode (i.e., physical vs. virtual) and the actions students used to manipulate the representation (i.e., via actions that draw attention or activate embodied schemas). We assessed students’ learning via reproduction and transfer posttests and interviews that measured the quality of students’ explanation and the gestures they used while explaining the concepts. Our results suggest that embodied schema theory accounts for effects on the reproduction posttest, whereas conceptual salience theories account for effects on the transfer posttest. Further, when physical manipulatives offered relevant haptic cues, we found an advantage of physical manipulatives on transfer. We interpret these results based on the complexity of embodied schema and conceptual salience learning mechanisms and the complexity of the assessment tasks.
  • Preventing interference: Reordering complexity in the learning of new concepts
    Item type: Journal Article
    Ziegler, Esther; Edelsbrunner, Peter A.; Star, Jon R. (2019)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
  • Preparation for Future Conceptual Learning: Content-Specific Long-Term Effects of Early Physics Instruction
    Item type: Journal Article
    Edelsbrunner, Peter; Schumacher, Ralph; Hänger-Surer, Brigitte; et al. (2024)
    Journal of Educational Psychology
    This study used a quasirandomized within-classroom design to investigate whether prior knowledge about physics gained in elementary school prepares students for future learning in related content areas in secondary school. A total of 433 children (intervention group) received four basic curriculum units on physics from their elementary school teachers. The units dealt with floating and sinking, air and atmospheric pressure, the stability of bridges, and sound and the spreading of sound. These children entered 60 newly composed classes in early secondary school that completed an advanced curriculum unit on hydrostatic pressure and buoyancy force with their secondary school teachers. A total of 942 students (control group) in these classes had not received the four basic physics curriculum units. On a conceptual knowledge test about hydrostatic pressure and buoyancy force, the intervention group outperformed the control group in the pretest (d = 0.28) and in the posttest (d = 0.25). Students in the intervention group showed similar learning gains as those in the control group, but when controlling for pretest performance, they achieved higher learning outcomes. Regression analyses within the intervention group revealed that this advantage resulted from the content-specific transfer of conceptual knowledge from topically related basic curriculum units. The basic physics instruction also prepared male and female students equally for future learning.
Publications 1 - 10 of 17