Journal: Instructional Science

Abbreviation

Instr Sci

Publisher

Springer

Journal Volumes

ISSN

0020-4277
1573-1952

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2010 - 2019122020 - 20255
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Publications 1 - 10 of 17
  • Productive failure in learning from generation and invention activities
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kapur, Manu; Rummel, Nikol (2012)
    Instructional Science
  • Making connections among multiple graphical representations of fractions: sense-making competencies enhance perceptual fluency, but not vice versa
    Item type: Journal Article
    Rau, Martina; Aleven, Vincent; Rummel, Nikol (2017)
    Instructional Science
    Prior research shows that representational competencies that enable students to use graphical representations to reason and solve tasks is key to learning in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. We focus on two types of representational competencies: (1) sense making of connections by verbally explaining how different representations map to one another, and (2) perceptual fluency that allows students to fast and effortlessly use perceptual features to make connections among representations. Because these different competencies are acquired via different types of learning processes, they require different types of instructional support: sense-making activities and fluency-building activities. In a prior experiment, we showed benefits for combining sense-making activities and fluency-building activities. In the current work, we test how to combine these two forms of instructional support, specifically, whether students should first work on sense-making activities or on fluency-building activities. This comparison allows us to investigate whether sense-making competencies enhance students’ acquisition of perceptual fluency (sense-making-first hypothesis) or whether perceptual fluency enhances students’ acquisition of sense-making competencies (fluency-first hypothesis). We conducted a lab experiment with 74 students from grades 3–5 working with an intelligent tutoring system for fractions. We assessed learning processes and learning outcomes related to representational competencies and domain knowledge. Overall, our results support the sense-making-first hypothesis, but not the fluency-first hypothesis.
  • Teaching advanced surgical anatomy with visual representations: comparing perceptual fluency and sense making
    Item type: Journal Article
    Stahl, Christopher C.; Rau, Martina; Greenberg, Jacob A. (2023)
    Instructional Science
    Combinations of perceptual fluency and sense-making competencies contribute synergistically to learning gains in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. However, instructional principles depend on the target of instruction, and in many fields, the targets of instruction are quite different from undergraduate STEM education. Professional learning often involves the application of previously acquired conceptual knowledge in a perceptually complex reality. This paper focuses on the field of surgery, specifically the recognition of surgical anatomy, in which the target of instruction is perceptual ability rather than conceptual knowledge. We conducted two experiments in which 42 and 44 surgical trainees participated in perceptual-fluency and sense-making interventions, followed by tests of their ability to recognize surgical anatomy in real operative images. The results showed that perceptual-fluency interventions contributed to gains in perceptual knowledge relating to surgical anatomy, whereas sense-making interventions did not. We discuss our findings in terms of alignment between instructional design and instructional goals, and the application of advances in learning sciences to adult learning of complex skills.
  • Reinventing discovery learning: a field-wide research program
    Item type: Journal Article
    Abrahamson, Dor; Kapur, Manu (2018)
    Instructional Science
  • Productive failure in learning the concept of variance
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kapur, Manu (2012)
    Instructional Science
  • Is having more prior knowledge better for learning from productive failure
    Item type: Journal Article
    Toh, Pee L.L.; Kapur, Manu (2017)
    Instructional Science
    A critical assumption made in Kapur’s (Instr Sci 40:651–672, 2012) productive failure design is that students have the necessary prerequisite knowledge resources to generate and explore solutions to problems before learning the targeted concept. Through two quasi-experimental studies, we interrogated this assumption in the context of learning a multilevel biological concept of monohybrid inheritance. In the first study, students were either provided or not provided with prerequisite micro-level knowledge prior to the generation phase. Findings suggested that students do not necessarily have adequate prior knowledge resources, especially those at the micro-level, to generate representations and solution methods for a multilevel concept such as monohybrid inheritance. The second study examined how this prerequisite knowledge provision influenced how much students learned from the subsequent instruction. Although the prerequisite knowledge provision helped students generate and explore the biological phenomenon at the micro- and macro-levels, the provision seemingly did not confer further learning advantage to these students. Instead, they had learning gains similar to those without the provision, and further reported lower lesson engagement and greater mental effort during the subsequent instruction.
  • Teaching biology with narratives: examining the impact of affective and cognitive variables on undergraduate student learning
    Item type: Journal Article
    Tobler, Samuel; Sinha, Tanmay; Köhler, Katja; et al. (2025)
    Instructional Science
    Despite the challenges posed by expository instruction materials, including unfamiliar text structure and abstracted and isolated representation of the contents, they constitute a primary means of studying scientific concepts in higher education. Conversely, utilizing narratives to present the to-be-learned content was conjectured to mitigate some of these limitations. Yet, empirical evidence at the undergraduate level remains inconclusive. In this design-based research experimental study, we examined the effects of expository and narrative instruction on the recall, understanding, and transfer of core biological concepts among 109 undergraduate natural science students. Moreover, we investigated diverse affective and cognitive mechanisms that may be differently influenced by the instruction. To enhance our analyses beyond traditional significance testing, we conducted complementary bootstrapped effect size comparisons and Bayesian analyses to be able to additionally quantify the results, estimate the uncertainty of the findings, and incorporate means to compensate for potential violations of normality and homogeneity assumptions. We found that learning with narratives resulted in higher knowledge transfer. Further, there was tentative evidence that students with less prior biology knowledge may benefit more from narrative instruction concerning understanding and recall, while expository materials appeared to rather support those with more background in biology. Furthermore, examining the learning mechanisms revealed that narratives may lead to higher self-efficacy and more effective working memory resource allocation. There was also some evidence for higher levels of satisfaction, cognitive engagement, and situational interest with less prior knowledge and narrative instruction. In contrast, the learning mechanism-related results for students with more prior biology education were comparable when reading the expository text. Overall, the study offers preliminary insights into when and why narratives might be better suited to teach scientific concepts than expository texts, also in light of closing achievement gaps in education, but underscores the need for additional research in this field.
  • Productive failure in mathematical problem solving
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kapur, Manu (2010)
    Instructional Science
  • Micro productive failure and the acquisition of algebraic procedural knowledge
    Item type: Journal Article
    Ziegler, Esther; Trninic, Dragan; Kapur, Manu (2021)
    Instructional Science
    Productive failure has shown positive effects on conceptual and transfer measures, but no clear effects on procedural measures. It is therefore an open question whether, and to what extent, productive failure methods may be used to enhance the learning of procedural skills. A typical productive failure study focuses on a single, complex concept; in contrast, procedural knowledge generally consists of a series of less-complex procedural steps. In this study, failure occasions were adapted to specifically fit procedural knowledge by introducing procedural problems prior to the formal instruction of relevant principles. These procedural problems offered brief but multiple occasions for failure, which we call micro productive failure. A total of 85 sixth-graders were introduced to algebraic expression simplification by providing problem-solving prior to instruction (PS-I condition), compared to providing problem-solving after instruction (I-PS condition). Findings reveal a stable effect of offering micro productive failure occasions for procedural learning; however, as anticipated, there were no effects on conceptual or transfer measures.
  • Productive dissent in learning communities
    Item type: Journal Article
    Trninic, Dragan; Swanson, Hillary; Kapur, Manu (2018)
    Instructional Science
    “Community” has become a commonplace term in the learning sciences. Alongside this popularization comes the view that communities are, in general, something to strive towards. We draw on contemporary trends to problematize this assumption and motivate a discussion for the productivity of dissent.
Publications 1 - 10 of 17