A multimodal analysis of college students’ collaborative problem solving in virtual experimentation activities: a perspective of cognitive load

Abstract

Distance education programs have become the preferred option for most higher education institutions to continue teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the effectiveness of some online courses, especially those engineering courses with experimentation activities, remains disputed. The main challenge is fostering collaborative problem solving skills for novice students as online collaboration increases their cognitive load. This research thus tapped into novice engineering students’ cognitive load to develop a more granular, multimodal view of how cognitive load influences student performance in collaborative problem solving during virtual experimentation activities. The findings of this research provided significant implications for the future design and implementation of virtual laboratories in computer science engineering education.

Competence Needs of Modern Virtual Community Members

“…In a study by Du et al (2022), individual students describe online communication as less efficient because it was more challenging to observe other team members' reactions and address individual team members. This causes greater anxiety (Du et al, 2022). Thus, in online communication, attention must be paid to higher quality communication than in analog communication.…”

“…Planning and implementation of a project are also mentioned as important competencies by Riehle & Weiner (2013). A paper examining students' cognitive load indicates that students suffer from more stress when working collaboratively than when working individually (Du et al, 2022). This also results in the competence of virtual teams to be able to regulate stress.…”

“…describe this as negotiations for authority. According toDu et al (2022), good coordination is also needed Kolm et al (2022). mention "a strong sense of responsibility toward the team, treating different opinions equally, and being perceptive to hints and insinuations" (p. 192) as needed skills.…”

Academic reading under a semantic enhancement environment: An empirical study on users' cognitive load and reading effect

“…Liao et al (2019) found that embedding videos significantly reduced learners' intrinsic and extraneous cognitive loads in exploring the effects of instructional videos in a game-based digital learning environment. Du et al (2022) examined how cognitive load influenced students' performance when using virtual experimentation activities. Baumeister et al (2017) Other studies have explored the impact of text structure (Jañez et al, 2021), content organization (DeStefano & LeFevre, 2007;Sanchiz et al, 2022), narrative style (Zumbach & Mohraz, 2008), navigation system (Ignacio Madrid et al, 2009), and so forth.…”

“…Liao et al (2019) found that embedding videos significantly reduced learners' intrinsic and extraneous cognitive loads in exploring the effects of instructional videos in a game‐based digital learning environment. Du et al (2022) examined how cognitive load influenced students' performance when using virtual experimentation activities. Baumeister et al (2017) concluded that augmented spatial reality reduced users' cognitive load by comparing different augmented reality technologies.…”