Self Regulated Learning: Self-Explanations

When presented with MERs, learners do not automatically retain information, they must actively organize and process it in order to be able to use it for later use (Kozma, 1994). Therefore, learners should have good metacognitive skills in order to be able to effectively learn from multimedia. Chi et al. (1989) suggest that good students solve problems well due to the way they studied the instruction or examples presented to them. This is inline with Perels, Gurtler, and Schmitz (2005) who found that teaching learners self-regulation strategies improves their problem solving ability and Schoenfeld and Herrmann (1982) who found that novices problem solving abilities can be improved to almost that of experts. Based on these conclusions, there is clearly a difference in the way that learners of different prior knowledge levels use representations. Learners with high prior knowledge, experts, can solve problems and form concepts because they have a better understanding of the material and therefore know how to make the appropriate connections. Low level learners do not have that understanding and therefore its important to figure out how these metacognitive strategies are used by both experts and novices to construct information. The current study intends to focus on one of these such strategies, self-explanations, which has been shown to help learners construct, understand, and retain information.

Current studies have shown that using self-explanations (Bereiter & Bird, 1985; Ainsworth & Burcham, 2007; Renkl, 1997) and multiple external representations (Carney & Levin, 2002) can help novice learners retain information. The use of self-explanations as a learning strategy has been shown to increase comprehension by creating a deeper understanding of the content (chi et al., 1994). Self-explanations, which are often times referred to as think alouds, are self-generated explanations that learners speak or think aloud while they are learning new material (Chi & VanLehn, 1991; Pressley et al., 1992). Research on self-explanations has shown that when used in a multimedia environment with MERs, learning and comprehension are increased. For example, Ainsworth and Loizou (2003) sought to discover the role self-explanations had on comprehension by presenting participants with either diagrams or text and having them think aloud as they were reviewing it. It was discovered that participants in the diagram treatments scored significantly better on tests measuring inference, created more self explanations, and spent less time studying the content. Participants who generated the most self-explanations were found to score significantly higher suggesting that the more students think aloud, the greater their comprehension. Similar results were uncovered by Aleven and Koedinger (2002) who sought to discover if self-explanations would lead to greater comprehension and problem solving ability. 41 high school students were placed into either an explanation (solve problems with think alouds) or problem solving (solve problems with no think alouds) treatment and were given a computer based instructional tutor. Students scored significantly higher on problem solving and comprehension measures in the self-explanation treatment. As a result of these studies, there is a clear advantage to using think alouds in learning and a benefit to using them in multimedia instruction. Roy & Chi (2005) have concluded that this happens “Because there is more information to explain in multimedia materials compared to single media (i.e., there are within and between media relationships to be discovered), a constructive activity such as self-explaining might be especially suited to learning from resources such as text and illustrations.” (p. 277).