The role of student tasks in accessing cognitive media types

  • Authors:

  • Michael Byrne;Mark Guzdial;Preetha Ram;Richard Catrambone;Ashwin Ram;John Stasko;Gordon Shippey;Florian Albrecht

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

  • Venue:
  • ICLS '96 Proceedings of the 1996 international conference on Learning sciences
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

We believe that identifying media by their cognitive roles (e.g., definition, explanation, pseudo-code, visualization) can improve comprehension and usability in hypermedia systems designed for learning. We refer to media links organized around their cognitive role as cognitive media types [Recker, Ram, Shikano, Li, & Stasko, 1995]. Our hypothesis is that the goals that students bring to the learning task will affect how they will use the hypermedia support system [Ram & Leake, 1995]. We explored student use of a hypermedia system based on cognitive media types where students performed different orienting tasks: undirected, browsing in order to answer specific questions, problem-solving, and problem-solving with prompted self-explanations. We found significant differences in use behavior between problem-solving and browsing students, though no learning differences.