Diehl and Mills: interaction with a device; procedural text, recall and task performance

By Tran Ha TP

According to Diehl and Mills authors of the article the effects of interaction with the device described by procedural text on recall, true/false, and task performance, information available while reading leads to differential development of representations in memory, which in turn, causes differences in performance on various measures.

There are some factors that influence to the reading effectiveness: text’s meaning, reader’s goal, and text’s organization (consistent or inconsistent). Additionally, active situation models include pictures, diagrams or objects also effectively contribute to the text’s comprehension. Also, quality of particular memory representation will affect on performance of a particular type of tasks. It should have an adequate text representation.

In two experiments, they use recall, true/false and task performance to measure the students’ interactions to the subjects in terms of memory, understanding and problem solving ability. Recall and multiple choice tasks should be influenced most by propositional representation. On the other hand, problem-solving tasks like task performance should be most affected by the situational representation.

In experiment 1, subjects were 50 students from liberal arts college. They only read the text (read only), saw the device described by the text while reading (read and see) or did the task while reading (read and do). It can be seen analyzed that read-only condition will lead to the development of good propositional representation. Read and see should be able to develop both an adequate situational and propositional representation. Read and do condition should lead the readers to focus on the task, there fore, it is the best of situational representation’ s development. Relatively, the read-only and read and see subjects will show better in recall and true/false tests since read and do subjects will do better on the task performance.

Again, doing the experiments under the time reading limitation, groups of read only and read and see are divided to yoked and unyoked. In the yoked condition, subjects are allowed to read in the same amount of time of subjects in read and do condition, whereas in the unyoked condition subjects use the amount of time that the wanted.

The result of the experiment can be summarized:

Experiment 2 included the 3 conditions from Experiment 1 (read and do, read and see, read only) and 2 more additional conditions (read–and-see-experimenter-do and read-and-imagine)

In the read–and-see-experimenter-do condition the subjects watched the experimenter performed each step after they read it. In read and imagine condition, the subjects imagined each step after they read it.

Subjects of Experiment 2 were 85 psychology students. And the tests were the same as in the Experiment 1. According to the table 2 in p. 683 of the arcticle, some conclusions can be drawn up:

General conclusion

From this, two experiments we can infer that the different conditions of the experiments lead to different mental representations of the task. Doing the task, watching the experimenter do the task or seeing the device described by the text while reading led to the formation of a better situational representation, resulting in better task performance.

From that conclusion, Min conducted parallel instruction theory (PI) for education. The purpose of the theory is that it can improve the quality of teaching and learning environment, which can affect positively to learners’ memory and comprehension.

Parallelism is a learning environment in which more than one window showing in a screen. In this environment several windows are showing at the same time, including: texts, sheets or pictures, model-driven growing graphics, animations, text-messages and/or video-messages (Min, 1999).

The best way of teaching and learning for computer simulation is that at the same time learners can see both simulated world and instructional materials. The PI based on that requirement of the learners who want to see the simulation environment in which everything can be viewed. The PI theory is useful for building simulation environment in which it can combine the advantages of learning by doing, learning by seeing, learning by seeing the results of experiment.

At the beginning, simulation had only 1 graphic on the screen. Instructors need the separate textbooks while using the simulation. The program for parallel, extra windows appeared to meet the needs of instructors. In 1989 an instruction system was developed in which the instruction program and simulation program appeared as the "sequentially presentation". However, two programs couldn’t be together at the same time in the screen, if one was switched "on" another should be "off".

And now, a complete simulation learning environment consists of several elements, some of them are:

In conclusion, the ideas of the PI theory are not only based on the multi windowing principles but also based to the human’s memory ability. People can split attention more than one window (from 3 to 6 at the same time). The more information the learners get the higher effectively they study. However, the designers should consider the cognitive load whether it’s too high. This problem can be solved if all information is related each other and one can explain for the others. Based on the PI theory in the simulation technology at the same time the learners can see the model simulation with the instructional materials. They can compare or test the results. In fact, they can read and see, read and do, read and see the experimenters do…. at the same time. It is no doubt that the quality or results of learning process would be increased as that are already discussed about.

References

Diehl, V., and Mills.
The effects of interaction with the device described by procedural text on recall, true/false, and task performance. Journal of .....