GVU Educational Projects

"Using Historical Analysis: Looking to the Past When Designing for the Present and Future"
Jesse Zolna
School of Psychology

"Strategies for Using Instructions in Procedural Tasks"
Elsa Eiríksdóttir
School of Psychology

"Students as Knowledge Builders: Wikis in the Classroom"
Andrea Forte
College of Computing

12:00 Noon on Thursday, October 12, 2006
TSRB 132

A number of design guidelines for the development of multimedia instructional materials have been developed under the assumption that learners have two modal processing channels, and that learning is better when people utilize both of these channels to store and process information (Mayer, 2001). The present research extends this approach by differentiating between internal and external effects of modality. The goal of this extension is to avoid the resemblance fallacy: the false assumption that internal representations have the same characteristics as external representations (Sacife & Rogers, 1996). An experiment demonstrates that this extension can better explain learning from multimedia. This knowledge helps provide more precise guidelines for the design of multimedia instructional materials.

Many procedural tasks that people need to do are unfamiliar or seldom encountered, in which case instructions are needed to help perform the task. Given that instructions are available, how do people make use of them? It is often assumed that instructions should be read before attempting a task, but people often do not use the instructions until they do not know (or cannot guess) what to do next. Which method is more beneficial to performing a procedure: reading the instructions before doing the task (instruction-based strategy) or using them as a reference (task-based strategy)? I have attempted to answer that question in an ongoing research project that compares the effect of these different strategies on one-time procedural performance, procedural learning, and transfer of procedural learning.

In the traditional model of education, students are typically not involved in the production of knowledge; they read what others have written for them and they listen to what more knowledgeable teachers have to say. It has been observed by educational researchers that resources like textbooks often conceal from students the disciplinary practices, passion and effort that authors invest in producing texts. Open content production and wikis in particular provide an unprecedented opportunity to involve students in the intellectual work of the world. Science Online is a new project at Georgia Tech that explores the power of open content development as a learning activity using wiki tools.