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Much evidence shows that instruction that actively engages students with learning materials is more effective than traditional, lecture-centric instruction. These "active learning" models comprise an extremely heterogeneous set of instructional methods: they often include collaborative activities, flipped classrooms, or a combination of both. To date, it is unclear whether active learning is more effective if it combines collaboration support with flipped classroom methods. We conducted a quasi-experiment as part of an advanced general chemistry course with 413 undergraduate students. We tested whether active learning is more effective than traditional instruction if it includes collaboration support only or a combination of collaboration support and flipped classrooms. Further, we explored effects on students' attitude. Our results show that only the combination of collaboration support and flipped classroom methods led to significantly higher learning outcomes than traditional instruction. Furthermore, our results reveal potential negative effects of active learning interventions on student attitudes.

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Research shows that multiple external representations can significantly enhance students' learning. Most of this research has focused on learning with text and 1 additional graphical representation. However, real instructional materials often employ multiple graphical representations (MGRs) in addition to text. An important open question is whether the use of MGRs leads to better learning than a single graphical representation (SGR) when the MGRs are presented separately, 1-by-l across consecutive problems, accompanied by text and numbers. A further question is whether providing support for students to relate the different representations to the key concepts that they depict can enhance their benefit from MGRs. We investigated these questions in 2 classroom experiments that involved problem solving practice with an intelligent tutoring system for fractions. Based on 112 sixth-grade students, Experiment 1 investigated whether MGRs lead to better learning outcomes than 1 commonly used SGR, and whether this effect can be enhanced by prompting students to self-explain key concepts depicted by the graphical representa tions. Based on 152 fourth-and fifth-grade students, Experiment 2 investigated whether the advantage of MGRs depends on the specific representation chosen for the SGR condition because prior research suggests that some SGRs might promote learning more than others. Both experiments demonstrate that MGRs lead to better conceptual learning than an SGR, provided that students are supported in relating graphical representations to key concepts. We extend research on multiple external representations by demonstrating that MGRs (presented in addition to text and 1-by-l across consecutive problems) can enhance learning.

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