Abstract
Recent studies documented that the act of writing explanations improves students’ learning only to a limited extent, as students attend less frequently to genre-typical features of comprehensibility during writing explanations (i.e., cohesion). In this study, we investigated whether learning by writing explanations can be enhanced when students additionally receive computer-based feedback on the cohesion of their explanations. Sixty-one advanced students studied a hyper-text about photovoltaic panels. Afterwards, they provided a written explanation about the learning content. During writing, students randomly received either individual computer-based feedback in the form of a concept map or not. Our findings indicated that students who received additional concept map feedback outperformed students without such feedback on a transfer test. Mediation analyses revealed that the effect of the concept map feedback on students’ transfer was mediated by the level of global cohesion of the provided explanations. Thus, we can conclude that learning by writing explanations can be enhanced by formative computer-based feedback that provides specific information about the quality of students’ written explanations.
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Notes
A mediation analysis with student’ prior knowledge as covariate a × b = 1.21, 95% CI [0.35, 2.68] produced the similar results.
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Acknowledgements
The data reported in this article were collected by Carmen Neuburg as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master’s degree at the University of Freiburg. All data were completely reanalyzed in preparation for this paper. We would like to thank Eleonora Dolderer for helping us with coding the data, and Brian Davis for proofreading the manuscript.
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Appendix
Translated instruction for the revision activities
Prompt for the revision activities (in both experimental conditions) | Now you have the opportunity to revise your explanation. Writing research has shown that cohesion is a critical feature of explanatory texts to enhance comprehensibility. Cohesion refers to the relations within a text or sentence that holds a text together Please revise your explanation for cohesion. For that purpose, make the references and relations between adjacent sentences explicit, and structure your ideas Search for missing references (i.e. cohesion gaps) between neighboring sentences, and apply strategies to close the cohesion gaps Search for concepts or links which you might have missed in your draft |
Information for the concept map feedback group | To support your revisions, you are provided with feedback in the form of a concept map. The concept map depicts a conceptual representation of your explanation. Deficits of cohesion of adjacent sentences in your explanation are marked as isolated fragments of concepts in the concept map. Additionally, the concept map portrays the overall structure and all the concepts you used in your explanation |
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Lachner, A., Neuburg, C. Learning by writing explanations: computer-based feedback about the explanatory cohesion enhances students’ transfer. Instr Sci 47, 19–37 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-018-9470-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-018-9470-4