Do Multiple Representations Need Explanations? The Role of Verbal Guidance and Individual Differences in Multimedia Mathematics Learning.

Abstract

Elementary school children, some of whom were nonnative speakers of English, learned to add and subtract integers in a discovery-based multimedia game either with or without verbal guidance in English or optionally in Spanish (Groups G-verbal guidance and No-G-no verbal guidance, respectively). Group G members chose to listen to verbal explanations in their first language and showed larger posttest scores than Group No-G. High-computer-experience students in Group G outperformed the rest of the students on training session scores and a transfer test. Longer latencies to respond to practice problems affected all learning measures positively. Results support the use of verbal guidance for discovery-based multimedia games and show that multimedia games may not be equally effective for all learners.What is the role of verbal guidance in promoting mathematics learning from a discovery-based multimedia game? Are there important individual differences for which a multimedia game helps some kinds of learners more than others? These are important questions both for research and for the application of research, to improve instruction and learning outcomes in learning mathematics with multimedia programs. Our first question is concerned with the issue of how one should design multimedia games to enhance student learning and focuses on the role of verbal guidance as an aid to meaning making. To answer this question, we examined the cognitive consequences of learning how to add and subtract positive and negative numbers within a discovery-based multimedia game either with or without verbal guidance. Our second question is concerned with the issue of how individual differences influence learning from interactive multimedia games. More specifically, we were interested in examining the role that students' computer experience and latency to solve problems had when students were asked to learn from a discovery-based computer game that presented multiple representations (symbolic and visual) of the arithmetic procedure.The main goal of this study was to investigate if the benefits of guidance that had been documented in past research on discoverybased strategies in the classroom extended into the realm of multimedia learning. In our study, elementary students studied 16 addition and subtraction problems involving positive and negative numbers in each of four training sessions with two representations of the arithmetic procedure: a symbolic representation consisting of the number sentence (i.e., 2 Ϫ Ϫ5 ϭ ___) and a visual representation using a number line and a computer animation to show how the symbolic number sentence relates to a bunny's movements along the number line. One group of students learned without verbal guidance and was presented with the symbolic and visual representations alone (Group No-G). Another group of students learned with identical symbolic and visual representations but was presented, additionally, with a verbal description (in English or optionally in Spanish) explaining how the symbols related to the bun...

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