Providing students with illustrative diagrams showing
relationships among key concepts to be discussed in a lecture can boost student
learning and recall, especially for students who have difficulty organizing
bits and pieces of related information into a cohesive mental framework,
suggests a new study from psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis.
"Teachers need to understand that providing supportive
material in advance can make a big difference in helping students grasp and
lock in key concepts presented in a lecture," said study co-author Mark
McDaniel, PhD, a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and co-director
of the university's Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and
Education.
"Some students are very good at building these mental
frameworks on their own, but others struggle with the process, and it's those
students who will benefit most from getting extra support in advance of the
lecture," McDaniel said. "It shows them a basic framework or model of
the concept that they can begin building in their minds."
Published in the June issue of the Journal
of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, the study's lead
author is Dung Bui, PhD, a recent graduate of the psychology doctoral program
at Washington University.
The findings show how success in learning can be linked to
important individual differences in how our minds process information --
differences that educators should consider, McDaniel said.
"If instructors want all their students to learn the
material, they need to realize there are differences in learning skills and
present information in a format that works better for students with
less-developed skills," McDaniel said. "If organizationally
challenged students get the right advance support, they are more than capable
of learning the material. The more advance support, the better."
In this study, 144 college undergraduates with no mechanical
experience listened to spoken explanations of how key components of an
automobile braking system work together to slow a car.
Participants were divided into three groups, with some
getting a blank sheet of notepaper, some getting bare-bones text outlines
describing key concepts, and others getting more detailed overviews with
embedded diagrams showing how brake shoes, drums and other parts fit together
to complete the braking system.
All completed a psychological assessment rating the ability
to build coherent mental representations of complex concepts -- a cognitive
skill known as "structure building."
Based on
research by Morton Ann Gernsbacher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
structure-building theory suggests deep comprehension requires a two-step
process in which learners must first identify and understand key terms and
concepts and then grasp how these pieces fit together into a cohesive
framework.
Skilled
structure builders are adept at building preliminary mental frameworks for
organizing information as it's being presented and then layering other
information on that foundation when it's deemed to be relevant, McDaniel said.
Unlike
common reading comprehension tests in which participants may refer back to
material presented in a written text, participants in the Bui and McDaniel
study were limited to what they could glean from the material as presented in
the lecture, forcing them to rely on their initial mental constructions to
answer subsequent questions.
Not
surprisingly, participants who rated high on structure-building skills needed
less support from outlines and diagrams. While high structure builders appeared
capable of building mental models on their own, even they performed better on
recall and problem-solving tests when provided with outlines or visual
diagrams.
Low
structure builders, on the other hand, needed every bit of advance support they
could get. While simple text outlines provided during note-taking didn't do
much to improve their scores, those who received handouts with diagrams did
much better on post-presentation problem-solving tests.
Both high
and low structure builders took fewer notes when presented with supporting
material, but the notes they took were of better quality and focused more on
connecting ideas as opposed to verbatim transcription, the study found.
Much
research has shown that trying to write down every word in a lecture is a poor
learning strategy because notetakers often focus mindlessly on capturing
individual words and miss the meaning behind them. Notetakers who use this
strategy usually don't perform well when asked to freely recall content from
the lecture, McDaniel said.
McDaniel is
now testing these findings in college classrooms. Preliminary work suggests
students with low structure-building skills are the ones who struggle most in
classes based around large lecture-hall presentations.
Some
educational experts argue that spoon-feeding students with detailed pre-lecture
outlines inhibits learning because students are not as challenged and focused
on the material as it's presented. Learning is stronger when it's hard, they
suggest.
Others
contend that learning is inherently hard and that it's a mistake to make it
harder by intentionally overworking scarce cognitive resources.
McDaniel
said there's research to support both arguments. He suggests the make-it-hard
school may make sense for learners with high structure-building skills, since
developing complex mental models comes easier to them and added rigor may help
them retain more for the long haul.
But for
students who have difficulty constructing mental frameworks, making the lecture
experience harder may simply result in a lot less learning, he said.
Why do we
see individual differences in structure-building abilities?
Some
suspect that low structure builders have trouble sorting out what information
is important to the model and what is extraneous. Others suggest a level of
prior knowledge is necessary to effectively build a mental framework on the
fly; that you need some grasp of the context to begin putting the pieces in
order.
"The
key takeaway here is that providing learners with supportive material in
advance of the lecture helps them build a comprehensive model of how each part
of the system relates to the next," McDaniel said. "The important
thing to realize is that there are learners who need more advance support to
learn challenging concepts."
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