Results (
Thai) 1:
[Copy]Copied!
equivalent on basic characteristics. They included a participant questionnaire,
a comprehension pretest, a spatial ability test, and a
motivation questionnaire. The participant questionnaire solicited information
concerning the students’ age and sex. The comprehension
pretest consisted of 25 multiple-choice items and was intended to
assess students’ prior-knowledge of information covered in the text.
Students’ spatial ability was measured with a 10 multiple-choice
paper-folding items taken from a battery of cognitive tests developed
by Ekstrom, French, and Harman (1976). The motivation
questionnaire assessed students’ current motivation for doing the
learning task after reading the instructions before the lesson. It consisted
of nine items from the challenge and interest subscales of the
Questionnaire on CurrentMotivation (QCM) developed by Rheinberg,
Vollmeyer, and Burns (2001). Cognitive load by means of invested
mental effortwas measured using the 7-point subjective rating scale
developed by Paas (1992), which ranges from (1) very low mental
effort to (7) very high mental effort. Cognitive load by means of perceived
task difficultywas measured using the 7-point subjective rating
scale developed by Kalyuga, Chandler, and Sweller (1999), which
ranges from (1) very easy to (7) very difficult. These subjective measures
have been criticized for assessing cognitive load with only single
items (e.g., Brünken, Plass, & Leutner, 2003). However, several studies
showed the effectiveness of the rating scale by showing that the variation
in learners’ cognitive load ratings depended on variations in
task complexity or instructional design (for overviews see Paas,
Tuovinen, Tabbers, & Van Gerven, 2003; Van Gog & Paas, 2008). In
this regard, Sweller, Ayres, and Kalyuga (2011) conclude that “the
simple subjective rating scale, regardless of thewording used (mental
effort or difficulty), has, perhaps surprisingly, been shown to be the
most sensitive measure available to differentiate the cognitive load
imposed by different instructional procedures” (p. 74). For that reason
and due to the economic applicability we decided to use this kind
of cognitive load measurement, while acknowledging the limitations
of a short, self-report instrument.
The two learning booklets each included a science text on the
biology of the influenza. The text explained the causal steps regarding
an infection with influenza and regarding the immune
response, which is an unfamiliar subject for eighth graders in higher
track secondary schools due to the German curriculum. The text consisted
of approximately 850 words (in German) and was divided into
seven paragraphs (as shown in Table 1).
The drawing version of the booklet contained seven pairs of facing
pages with a text paragraph on the left page and a two-part drawing
prompt on the right page. The first part of the drawing prompt included
a legend showing all the relevant elements (in total eight
elements) for drawing a picture for that text paragraph (as shown
in the top of Fig. 1). The second part of the drawing prompt included
a partly pre-drawn background for students’ drawing (as
shown in the bottom of Fig. 1). Overall, students had to make seven
drawings, i.e., one drawing to each paragraph.
The control version of the learning booklet contained four pairs
of facing pages with one of the seven text paragraph on each page.
Being translated, please wait..
