David Corradi

Understanding Possibilities and Limitations of Abstract Chemical Representations for Achieving Conceptual Understanding

When learning with abstract and scientific multiple external representations (MERs), low prior knowledge learners are said to have difficulties in using these MERs to achieve conceptual understanding. Yet little is known about what these limitations precisely entail. In order to understand this, we presented 101 learners with low prior knowledge of abstract scientific MERs to see (a) how many, and what kind of ideas (propositions) learners remembered from these MERs and (b) what the impact of these ideas is on conceptual understanding of the content. Propositional analysis indicates that learners created flawed internal representations. The discussion analyses the potentials that the learners have in using abstract representations to increase their understanding of scientific information and possible effects of instruction.

How multiple external representations can help or constrain learning in science

Redundant information has been found to be an important factor that can limit or enhance learning with multiple external representations (MER). As such, it is seen as a crucial factor in understanding how MER can help increase conceptual understanding with low prior knowledge learners, especially when these representations are presented in a sequence. In this study, multiple levels of redundant information are compared with each other to understand how redundancy determines learning with MER when these MER are sequenced. Ninety-two participants, undergraduates in education (age: M = 19.92 years, SD = 2.78 years), with low prior knowledge of the subject of chemistry participated in pretest-intervention-posttest randomized design to study texts and pictorial representations in a sequence. More specifically, we compared (a) 0% redundancy in MER, (b) 25% redundancy, (c) 50% redundancy, and (d) 100% redundancy. Results indicate that partial redundant information leads to the largest increase in understanding and ideas remembered.