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Sunday, April 17, 2011

The Worked-out Examples Principles in Multimedia Learning

Mayer, R.E. (Ed.) (2005). Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge. [Chapter 15]


Worked out examples principle: people gain deep understanding of a skill domain when they receive worked out examples in the beginning of the cognitive skill acquisition.

-Learners need to get  some understanding of the domain before they start solving problems.
worked out examples: problem formulation, solution steps, final solution.
-support initial acquisition of the cognitive skills

two consequences of a learner's prior knowledge:
1- the learner is unable to apply domain specific solution procedures 
          - general problem-solving strategies must be employed
2- learner cannot build bigger meaningful information chunks - creates intrinsic load
          - learners adopt means-end-strategy: where learner focuses on the details of a problem's solution but not on the principles behind it - creates extraneous load and leaves no space for generating self explanations (germane load)
-Worked out examples free space for understanding.

-expertise reversal effect of worked-out examples: if the learner is in later stages of expertise

Well-designed examples:
- Guidelines for fostering example processing: 
    Guidelines of self-explanation elicitation: Self explanation activities: 
      principle based explanations: learner assigns meaning to operators by identifying the domain principles
      explication of goal operator combinations: learner assigns meaning to operators by identifying the subgoals achieved by these operators
      example comparisons: learner notices similarities or differences between different examples
      anticipative reasoning: learner tries to anticipate the next solution step and confirms his prediction by looking it up
    Help Guidelines: instructional explanations 
      provision on learner demand: should be presented on learner demand, to ensure they are used on time and during the knowledge construction activities - so no split attention effect
     minimalism: short, minimal
     focus on principles: supported by principle based explanations
     related to the example at hand
     provided in reaction to a learner's error
     animated agent delivering explanations and using gaze and gesture to direct attention to the relevant parts of the examples 
- Guideliness for example design:
     The easy mapping guideline: -integrating, making the mapping between representations easier,
                                                           -combining visual and aural presentation modality,
                                                           - signaling,
            frees cognitive resources, hence examples become effective.
     The structure-emphasizing guideline: employed when the goal is learning to differentiate between different problem types in a domain that can be easily mixed up
     The meaningful building blocks guideline: assembling solution steps in a new way, subgoals should be made salient by visually isolating or assigning a label. 

Fading procedure for transferring from earlier stages  to later stages of acquiring skills: 1. a complete example
2. a structurally identical incomplete example
3. number of blanks are increased

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