| Description |
Self-regulated learning with online resources is a prevalent experience for today's learners, but these online learning opportunities frequently yield disappointing results when considering students' learning outcomes. The current research examined the impact of different forms of navigational scaffolds to help learners self-regulate their learning behaviors as they attempted to form well-organized, conceptual knowledge from varied online resources. Experiment 1 examined scaffolds for two potentially useful learning paths: conceptual coherence (depicted in a graphical overview of the domain) and foundational knowledge (depicted via visual cues about the importance of a concept to the domain). Results revealed no effects of a conceptual coherence scaffold on participants' self-regulated learning behaviors or learning outcomes. When foundational knowledge scaffolds were present, participants used more effective self-regulated learning strategies on higher priority concepts, but learning did not improve. Participants utilized prescribed learning paths only 63% of the time and thus may not have benefited from them. Experiment 2 investigated the impact of using a dynamic, automatic scaffold to structure learning paths through the online resources; both learning path (coherence vs. foundational) and amount of learner navigational control (low vs. high) were varied. Results revealed that when a foundational knowledge path was enforced, learners executed more effective self-regulated learning strategies and gained a deeper understanding of conceptual relationships. Overall findings suggest that learners working with digital resources benefit from navigational guidance that helps them focus on foundational ideas in an online, self-regulated environment. |
