ZusammenfassungWährend der durch die Corona-Pandemie bedingten Schulschließungen im März 2020 führten viele Schulen Fernunterricht ein, der häufig ohne wirkliche Vorbereitung als digitaler Unterricht organisiert wurde. Daraufhin war ein verstärkter Austausch unter Lehrpersonen in Online-Communities zu erwarten. Eine Analyse der Kommunikation der Online-Community Twitter-Lehrerzimmer erlaubte Einblick in aktuelle Themen und ermöglichte zudem den Vergleich von Themen vor und während der Schulschließungen. Zur Identifikation von Themen wurden computerlinguistische Analysemethoden basierend auf 128.422 Tweets sowie eine qualitative Inhaltsanalyse von 270 Tweets durchgeführt. Es zeigte sich, dass Themen wie (a)synchroner digitaler Unterricht bereits vorher besprochen, während der Schulschließungen jedoch häufiger und breiter thematisiert wurden. Das Twitter-Lehrerzimmer wurde für gegenseitige Unterstützung sowie den Austausch über drängende Herausforderungen genutzt wie etwa die Verfügbarkeit geeigneter (datenschutzkonformer) Software. Die Ergebnisse legen somit Defizite des Digitalisierungsprozesses aus der Perspektive Twitter-affiner Lehrpersonen in Deutschland offen und zeigen das Potenzial von Online-Communities für Austausch und Vernetzung.

Learners face various obstacles during learning from illustrated texts that can be conceptualized against the backdrop of frameworks of self-regulated learning. According to these frameworks, for learning to be successful, students must use appropriate cognitive strategies, hold adequate self-efficacy beliefs, and invest sufficient effort in learning. We investigated whether implementation intentions (if-then-plans) relating to these self-regulatory processes improve learning in a multimedia environment and whether they differ in their effectiveness depending on the self-regulatory process that they address. Learners were either asked to internalize an implementation intention relating to cognitive strategies, self-efficacy beliefs, or effort, or they did not receive any instructional support (control condition). Then, they learned about a mechanical system from a multimedia message and finally were tested on the learned contents. Contrary to expectations, none of the implementation intentions increased learning outcome, compared with the control condition, nor did the conditions differ from each other. However, implementation intentions interacted with the self-efficacy beliefs that learners already held. Higher self-efficacy beliefs were associated with better learning outcome, unless learners received an implementation intention telling them to use a multimedia-specific cognitive strategy. Interfering cognitive processes are discussed as a possible explanation for this interaction. In summary, implementation intentions should be further investigated and optimized before they can be implemented in real-life learning contexts.

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Background. It is well established that successful learning with multimedia is challenging, especially for younger learners.Aims. It was investigated whether students would profit from instructional support regarding the use of multimedia learning strategies.Sample. Participants were high school students in 8 th , 9 th , and 10 th grade (N = 168).Methods. Participants were assigned to a no-support control group or one of four experimental groups. In the experimental groups, students received either only a multimedia strategy training before learning (training group) or the training was enriched by prompts (prompts before or during learning) or if-then plans (implementation intentions). In the training, multimedia learning strategies were introduced (e.g., linking information from text and picture). The prompts and implementation intentions were aimed at enhancing the application of the multimedia strategies conveyed through the training. Students learned about the process of mitosis by studying multimedia instructions and were tested regarding the acquired knowledge. It was expected that solely training students to use adequate multimedia learning strategies would not promote learning compared with the control group, rather, that additional support like prompts or implementation intentions would be necessary to enhance learning.Results. Although in the experimental groups, multimedia learning strategies were used more frequently especially in the beginning of the instructional unit, there were no effects on learning outcome.Conclusions. Promoting multimedia strategy use did not improve learning. The quality of the different instructional support measures and their suitability for the target groups are discussed as possible explanations for these findings.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

It is well established in educational research that metacognitive monitoring of performance assessed by self-reports, for instance, asking students to report their confidence in provided answers, is based on heuristic cues rather than on actual success in the task. Subjective self-reports are also used in educational research on cognitive load, where they refer to the perceived amount of mental effort invested in or difficulty of each task item. In the present study, we examined the potential underlying bases and the predictive value of mental effort and difficulty appraisals compared to confidence appraisals by applying metacognitive concepts and paradigms. In three experiments, participants faced verbal logic problems or one of two non-verbal reasoning tasks. In a between-participants design, each task item was followed by either mental effort, difficulty, or confidence appraisals. We examined the associations between the various appraisals, response time, and success rates. Consistently across all experiments, we found that mental effort and difficulty appraisals were associated more strongly than confidence with response time. Further, while all appraisals were highly predictive of solving success, the strength of this association was stronger for difficulty and confidence appraisals (which were similar) than for mental effort appraisals. We conclude that mental effort and difficulty appraisals are prone to misleading cues like other metacognitive judgments and are based on unique underlying processes. These findings challenge the accepted notion that mental effort appraisals can serve as reliable reflections of cognitive load.

There is ample evidence that multimedia learning is challenging, and learners often underutilize appropriate cognitive processes. Previous research has applied prompts to promote the use of helpful cognitive processing. However, prompts still require learners to regulate their learning, which may interfere with learning, especially in situations where cognitive demands are already high. As an alternative, implementation intentions (i.e. if-then plans) are expected to help regulate behaviour automatically due to their specific wording, thereby offloading demands. Accordingly, this study aimed at investigating whether implementation intentions compared with prompts improve learning performance, especially under high cognitive load. Students (N = 120) learned either in a control condition without instructional support, with prompts, or with implementation intentions. Within each condition, half of the participants studied the multimedia instruction under conditions of either high or low cognitive load, which was experimentally manipulated by instructing them to perform one of two secondary tasks. In line with our hypotheses, the results showed that under low cognitive load, both prompts and implementation intentions led to better learning than the control condition. By contrast, under high cognitive load, only implementation intentions promoted learning. Thus, implementation intentions are an efficient means to promote learning even under challenging circumstances.

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