William Winn

Learning from maps and diagrams

This review of learning from maps and diagrams consists of two sections. The first section presents a theoretical framework for learning from maps and diagrams. The case is made that the symbol systems of maps and diagrams are sufficiently similar for them to be considered together. The theoretical framework is built around what is known of pre-attentive and top-down psychological processes. It accounts for the way people discriminate between symbols used in maps and diagrams and how they group them into clusters. The second section comprises a review of psychological and instructional research. This research provides support for a number of hypotheses arising from the theoretical framework. Many of these are based on the notion that maps and diagrams communicate a considerable amount of information by the way in which components are placed relative to each other and to the frame surrounding them. Evidence that configuration and discrimination are fundamental to learning from maps and diagrams is summarized in 10 concluding points.

Some implications of cognitive theory for instructional design

This article examines some of the implications of recent developments in cognitive theory for instructional design. It is argued that behavioral theory is inadequate to prescribe instructional strategies that teach for understanding. Examples of how instructional designers have adopted relevant aspects of cognitive theory are described. However, it is argued that such adoption is only a first step. The growing body of evidence for the indeterminism of human cognition requires even further changes in how instructional designers think and act. A number of bodies of scholarly research and opinion are cited in support of this claim. Three implications of cognitive theory for design are offered: instructional strategies need to be developed to counter the reductionism implicit in task analysis; design needs to be integrated into the implementation of instruction; designers should work from a thorough knowledge of theory not just from design procedures.

Research into Practice: Current Trends in Educational Technology Research: The Study of Learning Environments

Educational technology research has passed through a number of stages, focusing, in turn, on the content to be learned, the format of instructional messages, and the interaction between computers and students. The field is now concerned with the study of learning in complete, complex, and interactive learning environments. These environments allow both the simulation of experiences that students might have in the real world and also the creation of compelling experiences that cannot normally be experienced directly. Learning environments also often allow students to communicate their own ideas with the use of a variety of symbol systems. These environments are also frequently inhabited by more than one person, making learning within them a social activity where learning is distributed among both people and artifacts. Finally, these learning environments are complex. Studying how they contribute to learning therefore requires research methods other than controlled experiments. This paper reviews research on learning environments to give both an historical perspective on educational technology research and a selective view of the current state of the discipline. It concludes by identifying implications for both practice and future research.

7 The Design and Use of Instructional Graphics

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the design and use of instructional graphics. The chapter presents methods through which designers can use graphics to convey meaning and instruct, the types of outcomes that graphics are particularly adept at facilitating, and the conditions that affect how well they succeed. The design of instructional graphics (charts, graphs and diagrams) is carried out by means of a decision-making process that is common to all instructional design. The purpose of design is to select the best instructional method from among many, and to base that selection upon a rational analysis of what the goals to be attained are, and the conditions under which their attainment is to occur. Instructional strategies that use graphics are chosen largely on the basis of the different ways in which different graphic forms convey meaning. Charts, graphs, and diagrams express ideas in a variety of ways, such as concrete concepts, such as the animals in a food chain, can be represented by words, by pictures of varying degrees of realism, or by arbitrary symbols.

A Constructivist Critique of the Assumptions of Instructional Design

Any analysis of constructivism is difficult because there is a great range of ideas and a great variety of theoretical positions whose proponents call “constructivist”. The idea that is common to all these flavors of constructivism is that students construct knowledge for themselves. The divergence of opinion among constructivists arises from differences in perception of the instructional implications of this basic tenet. For some, knowledge construction requires little more than the addition of coaching or help systems to traditional instructional strategies. For others who take a more radical position, knowledge construction implies that each of us knows the world in a different way, that there is therefore no shared objective world to teach about, and that consequently instructional analysis and prescription make no difference to what and how students learn. I must also point out that there is great diversity in the opinions and theoretical stances of instructional designers. These range from hard-core behaviorism to a cognitive orientation which, adopting the same tenet of knowledge construction, coincides with the position of “moderate” constructivists, as Merrill (1991) has pointed out. Only at their extremes are the positions of constructivists and instructional designers truly adversarial.

Encoding and retrieval of information in maps and diagrams

Research into perceptual and cognitive processes has focused on how people process and understand information presented in maps and diagrams. The author examines why graphics function the way they do. The basic constitution of a graphic item, the sequence in which the mind processes those items, the strategies people use to encode and remember information in graphics, the conjoint encoding of verbal and visual forms and the encoding of clusters for items and their labels are addressed. The importance of configuration and discrimination in encoding, understanding, and retrieving information in graphics is demonstrated. It is suggested that the discovery of predictable relationships concerning how items and interitem relationships are shown in graphics, and encoding and retrieval performance can form the basis of a theory from which to conduct further research and on which to build prescriptions for graphic design. >

Diagrams as Aids to Problem Solving: Their Role in Facilitating Search and Computation.

In two experiments, university students solved kinship problems as they studied family trees or lists of statements about who was whose parent. Subjects were given problems to solve requiring the application of rules to the statements or trees. In the first experiment, response latency was less for subjects seeing trees than for those seeing statements. It was also found that latency increased as the problems became more difficult. In the second experiment, response latencies for subjects seeing no rules were less on difficult problems than for subjects working with rules involving English and nonsense kinship terms. This difference disappeared with practice. These findings provided support for an account of diagram interpretation based on the facilitation of search and computation through the spatial arrangement of concepts.

Peer collaboration and virtual environments: a preliminary investigation of multi-participant virtual reality applied in science education

The use of virtual reality (VR) in education has in recent years become more commonplace. For example, Youngblut (1998) identifies over forty examples of VR applications that are specifically designed to support learning. In the past, most educational applications of VR have involved a single student interacting with objects within a virtual environment (VE). Advances in VR technologies, however, are opening the doors to a broad investigation of the potential for collaborative, multi-participant VE’s designed to enhance educational experiences. As it becomes possible to place more than one student within a VE simultaneously, questions arise regarding the potential impact of the collaborative aspects of the experience on both learning and the degree of presence perceived by participants.

A theoretical framework for research on learning from graphics

Abstract Recent advances in computer software and hardware have made it easy for people without skill in instructional design to create diagrams, charts and graphs, and have led to the inclusion of these graphics in all manner of applications. The development of a theory of how people learn from graphics leading to a prescriptive theory for their design is therefore urgently required. Such a theory must consist of a thorough description of the symbol system of graphics and of an account of how the symbolic elements of graphics influence preattentive and attentive perceptual and cognitive processes that lead to their interpretation by students. This chapter sketches such a theory and illustrates it with research on visual perception and learning from graphics.

Research Methods and Types of Evidence for Research in Educational Technology

Recent concern about lack of scientific rigor in educational research has led to a reexamination of educational research methods. Methodology requires particular attention when researchers study learning in complex learning environments such as classrooms or computer-driven environments that simulate complex processes. This article reaffirms the importance of experimental research for answering some research questions. It argues that nonexperimental methods, such as design experiments and methods applied to the study of large-scale educational programs, such as randomized field trials, are useful for answering other kinds of research questions about learning in complex settings. This article discusses the validity of evidence gathered using these nonexperimental methods. Finally, it suggests that the study of the dynamics of learning can help integrate data from experiments that reveal details about learning and data from nonexperimental research that reveal how learning occurs in complex settings.