Cognitive and Socio-Cultural Theories on Competencies and Practices Involved in Learning with Multiple External Representations

Abstract

Instruction often involves multiple external representations that use different symbol systems such as text and visuals. While multiple representations can help students learn by providing complementary information about complex concepts, they can hinder students’ learning if students fail to understand how each representation shows information or how multiple representations relate to one another. Cognitive research has investigated which competencies help students learn with multiple representations. This line of research suggests that students need to acquire verbal sense-making competencies and nonverbal perceptual fluency with multiple representations, as well as meta-representational competencies. Socio-cultural research has investigated how students acquire representation practices while interacting with members of scientific, professional, or learning communities. This research suggests that enculturation in such communities involves both verbal and nonverbal communication processes that allow students to use representations to participate in disciplinary discourse. The goal of this chapter is to describe how these theoretical perspectives have influenced research on the processes through which students learn representational competencies and practices in learning with multiple representations. In doing so, I highlight overlap and differences between the cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives. As practical interventions are the focus of later chapters, I only briefly discuss how these perspectives can inform instruction.