A motivational perspective on the relation between mental effort and performance: Optimizing learner involvement in instruction

Abstract

Motivation can be identified as a dimension that determines learning success and causes the high dropout rate among online learners, especially in complex e-learning environments. It is argued that these learning environments represent a new challenge to cognitive load researchers to investigate the motivational effects of instructional conditions and help instructional designers to predict which instructional configurations will maximize learning and transfer. Consistent with the efficiency perspective introduced by Paas and Van Merriënboer (1993), an alternative motivational perspective of the relation between mental effort and performance is presented. We propose a procedure to compute and visualize the differential effects of instructional conditions on learner motivation and illustrate this procedure on the basis of an existing data set. Theoretical and practical implications of the motivational perspective are discussed.

Instructional Efficiency: Revisiting the Original Construct in Educational Research

“…Moreover, attention for the nature of the relationships between the different measures included in the efficiency measure is Instructional Efficiency necessary, for example, motivation is likely to influence effort investment (cf. Paas et al, 2005), so it is questionable whether adding it as a separate variable to the efficiency measure has added value.…”

“…This difference will become more pronounced at the extreme end of the scale: Research has shown that when a learner perceives a problem to be extremely difficult, s/he may not be motivated to invest much effort in this problem (see e.g., Bandura, 1989;Cennamo, 1993;Paas, Tuovinen, Van Merriënboer, & Darabi, 2005;Pintrich & Schrauben, 1992). As such, questions of perceived task difficulty or invested mental effort will presumably lead to non-equivalent ratings.…”

Knowledge elaboration: A cognitive load perspective

“…The alternative explanations of the expertise reversal effect, suggested by other researchers, are based on learner motivation and the degree of learner engagement. For example, more experienced learners may not be sufficiently motivated to be deeply engaged in studying seemingly familiar explanations (McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996;Paas, Tuovinen, van Merriënboer, & Darabi, 2005). Establishing the exact nature of the expertise reversal effect will require direct empirical evidence of associated cognitive processes, for example, by analyzing advanced learners' concurrent and retrospective verbal reports supplemented by the records of eye movements when studying well-guided instructional materials in familiar task domains.…”

Observational learning from animated models: effects of studying–practicing alternation and illusion of control on transfer

“…We will investigate this question from two perspectives. The first departs from the stance that cognitive load theorists increasingly emphasize the motivational aspects of learning (Gerjets and Scheiter 2003;Paas et al 2003;Paas et al 2005;van Merriënboer and Sweller 2005) and that motivation is assumed to be a major contributor to the willingness of learners to engage in genuine learning activities (van Merriënboer and Ayres 2005). However, for learning to commence, instructional strategies have to be used that effectively guide the learner's investment of mental effort and take account of the learner's limited cognitive capacity.…”