Promoting the Collaborative Use of Cognitive and Metacognitive Skills Through Conceptual Representations in Hypermedia
Conceptual representations can serve as frameworks that can guide learners to organize their knowledge. These representations are important for learners in constructing knowledge, engaging in inquiry, and helping them to understand complex phenomena. This
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Promoting the Collaborative Use of Cognitive and Metacognitive Skills Through Conceptual Representations in Hypermedia Lei Liu and Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver
Introduction Conceptual representations can serve as frameworks that can guide learners to organize their knowledge. These representations are important in constructing knowledge, engaging in inquiry, and helping understand phenomena (Liu & Hmelo-Silver, 2009). Suthers and Hundhausen (2003) found that using different representations could guide the learning process and alter the course of collaborative learning conversations. In addition, hypermedia can be an effective representational aid for supporting individual understanding (e.g., Jacobson & Archodidou, 2000). This study addressed a gap in research on how learners’ cognitive and metacognitive skills are developed in a hypermedia context in collaborative learning settings. Specifically, in this study we used alternative conceptual representations to organize hypermedia. In hypermedia, students are given access to a range of nonlinear information. Such nonlinear organization provides new possibilities for teaching about the structure of a domain but also provides challenges for students’ self-regulated learning (Azevedo, 2005). By selfregulated learning (SRL), we take the definition by Azevedo, Johnson, Chauncey, and Burkett (2010) that “SRL is an active and constructive process whereby learners set learning goals and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognitive and metacognitive processes in the service of those goals” (p. 229). In this chapter, we focus, in particular, on knowledge co-construction and the metacognitive aspect of
L. Liu (*) Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] C.E. Hmelo-Silver Department of Educational Psychology, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 10 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] D.F. Treagust and C.-Y. Tsui (eds.), Multiple Representations in Biological Education, Models and Modeling in Science Education 7, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4192-8_5, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013
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self-regulated learning. We take a situated cognitive perspective in noting how a technology-rich learning environment can provide affordances and constraints for cognitive and metacognitive processing (Lajoie, 2008). Hypermedia by itself may provide challenges to cognitive and metacognitive processing. Research has shown that a browsing task, due to its lack of focus, yields low levels of both factual and conceptual learning (Jonassen & Wang, 1993). This finding suggests that learning in a poorly designed hypermedia environment may add additional cognitive complexity to self-regulated learning, because it requires learners to generate inferences and connections between and among elements of the database. These challenges may be further magnified during collaborative learning. In the study repor
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