The effects of spatial organization and student generation during self-regulated, online learning with domain overviews

Concept maps have been shown to have positive effects for students on recall. This is because, among other things, they are designed to show learners the relationships between concepts in a visuospatial way. However, it remains to be seen how concept maps affect deeper forms of learning, or whether it is the attention to the relationship between the concepts in the map or the concepts themselves that support the learning. This research examined the impact of the spatial organization of graphical search interfaces on deep learning as well as the impact of focusing student attention on the conceptual relationships between map nodes in this graphical search interface by asking them to generate information about those relationships. Results showed a nonsignificant trend suggesting that participants who were asked to generate information about the relationship between concepts showed greater recall when not learning from a concept map.