Metacognition in self-regulated multimedia learning: integrating behavioural, psychophysiological and introspective measures

Abstract

This study aims at investigating students' strategies -as revealed by behavioural, psychophysiological and introspective measures -which are applied during the free exploration of multimedia instructional presentations, which requires students to self-regulate their learning processes. Two multimedia presentations were constructed and presented to a sample of 20 undergraduates in two conditions: written text + pictures vs. audio text + pictures. While students were engaged in the study of the presentations, their eye movements were registered and psychophysiological indices were monitored. Students' learning outcomes were assessed and a questionnaire was employed to record students' awareness of the mental processes involved in the task. Results showed that students were able to discriminate between the written-and audio-text conditions and self-regulate their behaviour accordingly. A model, assuming psychophysiological indices as predictors of different eye-movement patterns, highlighted significant differences between the written-and the audio-text conditions. A regression model, considering learning outcomes as a dependent variable, showed that the number of correct responses could be predicted according to the level of cognitive effort needed during the exploration of the multimedia presentations.

Combining physiological data and subjective measurements to investigate cognitive load during complex learning

“…For instance, when investigating the event 'consultation of support' more in detail, peaks were related to students (N = 4) watching a video that explains the circumference of a circle. This is line with previous research indicating that GSR responses are associated with effortful cognitive processing during multimedia learning (Antonietti, Colombo & Di Nuzzo, 2015). Additionally, hardly any peaks were found for the low complex task during writing, which is in line with the study of Mudrick, Taub, Azevedo, Price & Lester (2017).…”

Production Processes for Creating Educational Videos

“…One way to hit all three aims in online classrooms is including asynchronous videos in addition to synchronous videos (Clark et al, 2015). Meaningful interactivity promotes student learning (Cairncross and Mannion, 2001;Anderson et al, 2008;Antonietti et al, 2015). For example, holding discussion during synchronous lectures and then use asynchronous videos to further explain or demonstrate the context of the lesson, or vice versa.…”

Multimodal data to design visual learning analytics for understanding regulation of learning

“…The use of multimodal data in general and learning regulation in particular is emerging and progressing quickly in the learning sciences (Antonietti et al, 2014;Blikstein et al, 2016;Harley et al, 2015;Worsley & Blikstein, 2015). Single physiological markers can only capture affective states of learners in complex learning situations (D'Mello et al, 2017) without accompanying context to aid in/allow for interpretation.…”