Age differences in search during self-regulated learning

search;information foraging;metacognition;learning;self-regulation;foraging;cognitive aging;self-regulated learning;comprehension;metacomprehension;text prediction;stopping rules;stopping decisions;encoding fluency

Chin, Jessie

关键词: search;    information foraging;    metacognition;    learning;    self-regulation;    foraging;    cognitive aging;    self-regulated learning;    comprehension;    metacomprehension;    text prediction;    stopping rules;    stopping decisions;    encoding fluency;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/90705/CHIN-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

While search is increasingly becoming a more central process in learning with the rise of electronic environments, little is known about how learners determine the points at which decide to move from one text to another. The current study aimed at examining how learners studying a domain in a multitext environment regulate their effort among multiple sources. Specifically, the goal was to understand the principles governing when learners discontinue reading about one topic to explore another in that domain. By manipulating the amount of new information and conceptual overlap across texts within a topic, we created three types of text environments to generate different trajectories of two cues to perceived learning, new information (measured by rating of perceived new information) and encoding fluency (measured by ratings of reading ease). We report a series of five studies (in Mechanical Turk and the lab; N=180), showing that learners leave one topic for another when perceived learning decreases. The dominant cue to gauge perceived learning was the perceived amount of new information, while encoding fluency became more important when the study time was limited or among the older adults with poorer verbal ability. Interestingly, older adults were able to take differential advantages of conceptual overlap across texts for learning the text in which was high in the amount of new information. The study extended theories in animal foraging and metacognition, and established a novel paradigm to better investigate adult learning in the wild.