Many college students are not progressing in the development of their critical thinking skills. Concept mapping is a technique for facilitating validation of one's critical thinking by graphically depicting the structure of complex concepts. Each of our three studies of concept mapping involved approximately 240 students enrolled in four sections…

Research is not clear on how to address the difficulty students have conceptualizing geologic processes and phenomena. This study investigated how animations coupled with seductive details effect learners' situational interest and emotions. A quantitative quasi-experimental study employing an independent-measures factorial design was used. The…

Traditional instructional materials such as textbooks contain significant educational content, but the navigational mechanisms to access that content are limited and, more importantly, not designed with learning in mind. To address this gap, we present the Adaptive Map, a novel organization and navigation tool designed to help students better…

The present study examines how various types of attention cueing and cognitive preference affect learners' comprehension of a cardiovascular system and cognitive load. EFL learners were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: non-signal, static-blood-signal, static-blood-static-arrow-signal, and animation-signal. The results indicated that…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

Information technology (IT) investment decision makers are required to process large volumes of complex data. An existing body of knowledge relevant to IT portfolio management (PfM), decision analysis, visual comprehension of large volumes of information, and IT investment decision making suggest Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the new Cognitive Spare Capacity Test (CSCT), which measures aspects of working memory capacity for heard speech in the audiovisual and auditory-only modalities of presentation. Method: In Experiment 1, 20 young adults with normal hearing performed the CSCT and an independent battery of…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

This study investigated the effects of visual cues in multiple external representations (MER) environment on the learning performance of novices' program comprehension. Program codes and flowchart diagrams were used as dual representations in multimedia environment to deliver lessons on C-Programming. 17 field independent participants and 16 field…

The purpose of this study was to examine the instructional effectiveness of different levels of chunking (simple visual/text and complex visual/text), different forms of feedback (item-by-item feedback, end-of-test feedback and no feedback), and use of instructional gaming (game and no game) in complementing animated programmed instruction on a…

This paper presents the results of research from Project REALISTIC, a program of research to determine REAding, LIStening and arithmeTIC requirements for jobs; and the feasibility of substituting listening for reading as a means for instructing men of different mental aptitude levels as measured by the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). Two…