Anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation
A persistent instructional challenge in any education domain is how to scaffold student learning. In the research area of an established instructional strategy called “self-explanation” (Chi et al., 1989), studies have not fully explored how self-explanation activities can be scaffolded so that students can learn and perform well. In this project, we designed a novel form of self-explanation called “anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation”. In anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation, students are asked to infer a good next problem-solving step before working on the step.
The design of the interaction and the interface is based on the co-design work with middle-school teachers and user-testing with middle schoolers. We have been conducting (remote) classroom experiments, testing the effectiveness of the strategy.
Relevant papers
- Nagashima, T., Bartel, A. N., *Tseng, S., Vest, N.A., Silla, E. M., Alibali, M. W., & Aleven, V. (2021). Scaffolded self-explanation with visual representations promotes efficient learning in early algebra. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci2021).
- Nagashima, T., Bartel, A. N., *Yadav, G., *Tseng, S., Vest, N. A., Silla, E. M., Alibali, M. W., & Aleven, V. (2021). Using anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation to support learning and performance in early algebra. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS2021), Bochum, Germany [acceptance rate: 33%]. Best Design Paper Nominee.