Tacit guidance for collaborative multimedia learning

Abstract

Collaborative multimedia learning is a scenario placing various demands on the learners that go beyond understanding complex issues and coordinating a learning discourse. On the one hand, individuals have to mentally interrelate multiple external representations in order to understand the learning material and the underlying concepts; on the other hand, during collaboration, learners have to use the differently coded information in order to exchange conceptual knowledge. In this paper, the development and experimental evaluation of a group awareness tool ( collaborative integration tool) is presented that is intended to simultaneously support both individual and collaborative learning processes during dyadic collaborative multimedia learning. The tool was experimentally compared with an integration task that already proved to foster meaningful individual learning processes. The results suggest that providing group awareness can lead to better individual learning gains by reducing demanding processes and by tacitly guiding learner interactions.