J. Elizabeth Richey | Carnegie Mellon University (original) (raw)
Papers by J. Elizabeth Richey
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge
How do the features of a learning environment's user interface impact learners' agency and, furth... more How do the features of a learning environment's user interface impact learners' agency and, further, their learning? We explored this question in the context of Decimal Point, a digital learning game designed to support middle school students in learning decimals. Previous studies of the game showed that giving students the ability to choose the order and number of mini-games to play did not significantly impact their learning outcomes compared to a condition without choice. In this paper we explore whether some elements of the game's interface may have inadvertently exerted indirect control over students' choice, leading to the previous effects. We conducted a classroom study using a new version of the game that varied whether students saw a visual path connecting mini-games on the game map to modulate the level of indirect control students would experience with an implied ordering. Ultimately, we found that students in the no-line condition exercised significantly more agency but did not learn any less than the line condition. These results suggest that indirect control can be a subtle but powerful way to direct student attention in digital learning games.
The Journal of Experimental Education
Memory & cognition, 2018
We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent... more We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent vs. incoherent) on learning and transfer. Working in dyads or individually, participants classified examples from either an abstract coherent category, the features of which are not fixed but relate in a meaningful way, or an incoherent category, the features of which do not relate meaningfully. All participants were then tested individually. We hypothesized that dyads would benefit more from classifying the coherent category structure because past work has shown that collaboration is more beneficial for tasks that build on shared prior knowledge and provide opportunities for explanation and abstraction. Results showed that dyads improved more than individuals during the classification task regardless of category coherence, but learning in a dyad improved inference-test performance only for participants who learned coherent categories. Although participants in the coherent categories pe...
Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students' classroom experiences ... more Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students' classroom experiences and performance, yet most work examining achievement goals relies on self-report measures gathered through questionnaires. The current work aims to assess achievement goals using a task choice embedded within a typical classroom activity. Results show the behavioral measure of achievement goals predicts performance on the task, while self-reported achievement goals do not. Self-reported achievement goals predict quarterly grades, while the behavioral measure of achievement goals does not. This work supports the viability of a behavioral measure and suggests the achievement goals that students adopt at a task level may be different from their general class achievement goals. Using complementary achievement goal measures may improve understanding of how achievement goals relate to student behaviors and academic achievement.
Instructors in every domain face a fundamental challenge in determining when to provide students ... more Instructors in every domain face a fundamental challenge in determining when to provide students with explanations and when to allow them to generate their own. Past research examining the effects of providing or withholding explanatory material has provided ...
We compared types of transfer facilitated by instructions to engage in analogical comparison or s... more We compared types of transfer facilitated by instructions to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation. Participants received learning materials and worked examples with prompts supporting analogical comparison, selfexplanation, or instructional explanation study. Learners also self-reported their use of analogical comparison and selfexplanation on a series of questionnaires. We evaluated condition effects on self-reports and transfer, and the relations between self-reports and transfer. Receiving materials with analogical-comparison support and reporting greater levels of analogical comparison were both associated with worse transfer performance, while reporting greater levels of selfexplanation was associated with better performance. Learners' self-reports of analogical comparison and selfexplanation were not related to condition assignment, suggesting that the questionnaires did not measure the same processes promoted by the intervention, or that individual differences are robust even when learners are instructed to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation.
An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015
Metacognition, or knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena such as monitoring and regula... more Metacognition, or knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena such as monitoring and regulation, has been positively associated with academic performance and motivation (Flavell, 1979; Hacker et. al, 2000; Swanson, 1992; Wolters, 1998). It develops naturally into adulthood but there are large individual differences in its use and development, especially during adolescence. Although the development of metacognition is critical to problem solving and learning, it is rarely explicitly taught as a set of skills in school. We tested whether an instructional intervention designed to teach middle school students the declarative and procedural skills of metacognition increases student motivation, scientific reasoning, and conceptual understanding of physics. Prior to the intervention, we administered a series of pre-test assessments to analyze the students' metacognitive habits, motivation, and physics misconceptions. During the two-month intervention, students in two physics clas...
Educational Psychology Review, 2015
ABSTRACT Although collaboration is often considered a beneficial learning strategy, research exam... more ABSTRACT Although collaboration is often considered a beneficial learning strategy, research examining the claim suggests a much more complex picture. Critically, the question is not whether collaboration is beneficial to learning, but instead how and when collaboration improves outcomes. In this paper, we first discuss the mechanisms hypothesized to support and hinder group learning. We then review insights and illustrative findings from research in cognitive, social, and educational psychology. We conclude by proposing areas for future research to expand theories of collaboration while identifying important features for educators to consider when deciding when and how to include collaboration in instructional activities.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 2015
Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognit... more Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognitive skills results in changes to student metacognition, motivation, learning, and future learning in the classroom. We examined whether a 6-hr intervention designed to teach the declarative and procedural
components of planning, monitoring, and evaluation could increase students’ metacognition, motivation, learning, and preparation for future learning for middle school science. Forty-six eighth-grade students were randomly assigned to either a control group, which received extensive problem-solving practice, or an experimental group, which received more limited problem-solving practice along with metacognitive
instruction and training. Results revealed that those who received the metacognitive instruction and training were less biased when making metacognitive judgments, p = .03, d = 0.65, endorsed higher levels of motivation after instruction (e.g., there was a large effect on task value, p = .006, d = 0.87),
performed better on a conceptual physics test, p = .03, d = 0.64, and performed better on a novel self-guided learning activity, p = .007, d = 0.87. This study demonstrates that metacognitive instruction can lead to better self-regulated learning outcomes during adolescence, a period in which students’ academic achievement and motivation often decline.
Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 2014
Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students’ classroom experiences and ... more Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students’ classroom experiences and performance, yet most work examining achievement goals relies on self-report measures gathered through questionnaires. The current work aims to assess achievement goals using a task choice embedded within a typical classroom activity. Results show the behavioral measure of achievement goals predicts performance on the task, while self-reported achievement goals do not. Self-reported achievement goals predict quarterly grades, while the behavioral measure of achievement goals does not. This work supports the viability of a behavioral measure and suggests the achievement goals that students adopt at a task level may be different from their general class achievement goals. Using complementary achievement goal measures may improve understanding of
how achievement goals relate to student behaviors and
academic achievement.
PLoS One., 2014
Analogical reasoning has been hypothesized to critically depend upon working memory through corre... more Analogical reasoning has been hypothesized to critically depend upon working memory through correlational data [1], but less work has tested this relationship through experimental manipulation [2]. An opportunity for examining the connection between working memory and analogical reasoning has emerged from the growing, although somewhat controversial, body of literature suggests complex working memory training can sometimes lead to working memory improvements that transfer to novel working memory tasks. This study investigated whether working memory improvements, if replicated, would increase analogical reasoning ability. We assessed participants’ performance on verbal and visual analogy tasks after a complex working memory training program incorporating verbal and spatial tasks [3,4]. Participants’ improvements on the working memory training tasks transferred to other short-term and working memory tasks, supporting the possibility of broad effects of working memory training. However, we found no effects on analogical reasoning. We propose several possible explanations for the lack of an impact of working memory improvements on analogical reasoning.
Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2014
Achievement goals have been examined extensively in relationship to self-reported learning behav... more Achievement goals have been examined extensively in
relationship to self-reported learning behaviors and
achievement, yet very little work has observed the behaviors
through which achievement goals might influence learning
and performance. We collected fine-grained behavioral data
to assess students’ activities throughout the semester in a
college psychology course, and then used one learning
behavior, access to course outlines, to explain the relationship between self-reported achievement goals and grades. Results suggest that downloading course outlines partially mediates the relationship between goals and grades. Identifying how goals influence achievement through observable behaviors contributes to the theoretical understanding of achievement goals while also suggesting practical implications for instructors.
Educational Psychology Review, 2015
Robust knowledge serves as a common instructional target in academic settings. Past research iden... more Robust knowledge serves as a common instructional target in academic settings. Past research identifying characteristics of experts’ knowledge across many domains can help clarify the features of robust knowledge as well as ways of assessing it. We review the expertise literature and identify three key features of robust knowledge (deep, connected, and coherent) and four means of assessing these features (perception, memory, problem
solving, and transfer). Focusing on the domains of math and science learning, we examine how four instructional techniques—practice, worked examples, analogical comparison, and self-explanation—can promote key features of robust knowledge and how those features can
be assessed. We conclude by discussing the implications of this framework for theory and practice.
Learning & Instruction, 2013
A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amou... more A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We hypothesized that students would acquire more conceptual knowledge from withholding instructional explanations because they would be more likely to engage in constructive cognitive activities to understand the problem-solving steps, whereas providing instructional explanations might suppress such activities. Furthermore, we examined the roles of prior knowledge and student motivation in determining learning outcomes. Across three experiments, students in the withholding conditions showed greater conceptual learning than students in the providing conditions. Additionally, achievement goal orientations were more predictive of learning for the withholding conditions than the providing conditions. We discuss how the interactions between prior knowledge, motivation, and instruction can support learning and transfer.
Educational Psychology, 2014
This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and ... more This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their
motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science
lessons or a control condition that wrote summaries of those same lessons. Writing activities were 10 min long and were given approximately once a week for eighteen weeks. Student motivation was assessed via self-report surveys for achievement goals and interest in science before and after the intervention. Students in the experimental condition showed higher endorsement of mastery goals and reported greater situational interest in science topics after the intervention compared to students who summarised the lessons. Increases in situational interest predicted higher individual interest in the domain. Results indicate an instructional practice requiring just 3 hours out of a semester of instruction was sufficient to achieve these effects on motivation in science classes.
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge
How do the features of a learning environment's user interface impact learners' agency and, furth... more How do the features of a learning environment's user interface impact learners' agency and, further, their learning? We explored this question in the context of Decimal Point, a digital learning game designed to support middle school students in learning decimals. Previous studies of the game showed that giving students the ability to choose the order and number of mini-games to play did not significantly impact their learning outcomes compared to a condition without choice. In this paper we explore whether some elements of the game's interface may have inadvertently exerted indirect control over students' choice, leading to the previous effects. We conducted a classroom study using a new version of the game that varied whether students saw a visual path connecting mini-games on the game map to modulate the level of indirect control students would experience with an implied ordering. Ultimately, we found that students in the no-line condition exercised significantly more agency but did not learn any less than the line condition. These results suggest that indirect control can be a subtle but powerful way to direct student attention in digital learning games.
The Journal of Experimental Education
Memory & cognition, 2018
We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent... more We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent vs. incoherent) on learning and transfer. Working in dyads or individually, participants classified examples from either an abstract coherent category, the features of which are not fixed but relate in a meaningful way, or an incoherent category, the features of which do not relate meaningfully. All participants were then tested individually. We hypothesized that dyads would benefit more from classifying the coherent category structure because past work has shown that collaboration is more beneficial for tasks that build on shared prior knowledge and provide opportunities for explanation and abstraction. Results showed that dyads improved more than individuals during the classification task regardless of category coherence, but learning in a dyad improved inference-test performance only for participants who learned coherent categories. Although participants in the coherent categories pe...
Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students' classroom experiences ... more Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students' classroom experiences and performance, yet most work examining achievement goals relies on self-report measures gathered through questionnaires. The current work aims to assess achievement goals using a task choice embedded within a typical classroom activity. Results show the behavioral measure of achievement goals predicts performance on the task, while self-reported achievement goals do not. Self-reported achievement goals predict quarterly grades, while the behavioral measure of achievement goals does not. This work supports the viability of a behavioral measure and suggests the achievement goals that students adopt at a task level may be different from their general class achievement goals. Using complementary achievement goal measures may improve understanding of how achievement goals relate to student behaviors and academic achievement.
Instructors in every domain face a fundamental challenge in determining when to provide students ... more Instructors in every domain face a fundamental challenge in determining when to provide students with explanations and when to allow them to generate their own. Past research examining the effects of providing or withholding explanatory material has provided ...
We compared types of transfer facilitated by instructions to engage in analogical comparison or s... more We compared types of transfer facilitated by instructions to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation. Participants received learning materials and worked examples with prompts supporting analogical comparison, selfexplanation, or instructional explanation study. Learners also self-reported their use of analogical comparison and selfexplanation on a series of questionnaires. We evaluated condition effects on self-reports and transfer, and the relations between self-reports and transfer. Receiving materials with analogical-comparison support and reporting greater levels of analogical comparison were both associated with worse transfer performance, while reporting greater levels of selfexplanation was associated with better performance. Learners' self-reports of analogical comparison and selfexplanation were not related to condition assignment, suggesting that the questionnaires did not measure the same processes promoted by the intervention, or that individual differences are robust even when learners are instructed to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation.
An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015
Metacognition, or knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena such as monitoring and regula... more Metacognition, or knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena such as monitoring and regulation, has been positively associated with academic performance and motivation (Flavell, 1979; Hacker et. al, 2000; Swanson, 1992; Wolters, 1998). It develops naturally into adulthood but there are large individual differences in its use and development, especially during adolescence. Although the development of metacognition is critical to problem solving and learning, it is rarely explicitly taught as a set of skills in school. We tested whether an instructional intervention designed to teach middle school students the declarative and procedural skills of metacognition increases student motivation, scientific reasoning, and conceptual understanding of physics. Prior to the intervention, we administered a series of pre-test assessments to analyze the students' metacognitive habits, motivation, and physics misconceptions. During the two-month intervention, students in two physics clas...
Educational Psychology Review, 2015
ABSTRACT Although collaboration is often considered a beneficial learning strategy, research exam... more ABSTRACT Although collaboration is often considered a beneficial learning strategy, research examining the claim suggests a much more complex picture. Critically, the question is not whether collaboration is beneficial to learning, but instead how and when collaboration improves outcomes. In this paper, we first discuss the mechanisms hypothesized to support and hinder group learning. We then review insights and illustrative findings from research in cognitive, social, and educational psychology. We conclude by proposing areas for future research to expand theories of collaboration while identifying important features for educators to consider when deciding when and how to include collaboration in instructional activities.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 2015
Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognit... more Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognitive skills results in changes to student metacognition, motivation, learning, and future learning in the classroom. We examined whether a 6-hr intervention designed to teach the declarative and procedural
components of planning, monitoring, and evaluation could increase students’ metacognition, motivation, learning, and preparation for future learning for middle school science. Forty-six eighth-grade students were randomly assigned to either a control group, which received extensive problem-solving practice, or an experimental group, which received more limited problem-solving practice along with metacognitive
instruction and training. Results revealed that those who received the metacognitive instruction and training were less biased when making metacognitive judgments, p = .03, d = 0.65, endorsed higher levels of motivation after instruction (e.g., there was a large effect on task value, p = .006, d = 0.87),
performed better on a conceptual physics test, p = .03, d = 0.64, and performed better on a novel self-guided learning activity, p = .007, d = 0.87. This study demonstrates that metacognitive instruction can lead to better self-regulated learning outcomes during adolescence, a period in which students’ academic achievement and motivation often decline.
Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 2014
Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students’ classroom experiences and ... more Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students’ classroom experiences and performance, yet most work examining achievement goals relies on self-report measures gathered through questionnaires. The current work aims to assess achievement goals using a task choice embedded within a typical classroom activity. Results show the behavioral measure of achievement goals predicts performance on the task, while self-reported achievement goals do not. Self-reported achievement goals predict quarterly grades, while the behavioral measure of achievement goals does not. This work supports the viability of a behavioral measure and suggests the achievement goals that students adopt at a task level may be different from their general class achievement goals. Using complementary achievement goal measures may improve understanding of
how achievement goals relate to student behaviors and
academic achievement.
PLoS One., 2014
Analogical reasoning has been hypothesized to critically depend upon working memory through corre... more Analogical reasoning has been hypothesized to critically depend upon working memory through correlational data [1], but less work has tested this relationship through experimental manipulation [2]. An opportunity for examining the connection between working memory and analogical reasoning has emerged from the growing, although somewhat controversial, body of literature suggests complex working memory training can sometimes lead to working memory improvements that transfer to novel working memory tasks. This study investigated whether working memory improvements, if replicated, would increase analogical reasoning ability. We assessed participants’ performance on verbal and visual analogy tasks after a complex working memory training program incorporating verbal and spatial tasks [3,4]. Participants’ improvements on the working memory training tasks transferred to other short-term and working memory tasks, supporting the possibility of broad effects of working memory training. However, we found no effects on analogical reasoning. We propose several possible explanations for the lack of an impact of working memory improvements on analogical reasoning.
Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2014
Achievement goals have been examined extensively in relationship to self-reported learning behav... more Achievement goals have been examined extensively in
relationship to self-reported learning behaviors and
achievement, yet very little work has observed the behaviors
through which achievement goals might influence learning
and performance. We collected fine-grained behavioral data
to assess students’ activities throughout the semester in a
college psychology course, and then used one learning
behavior, access to course outlines, to explain the relationship between self-reported achievement goals and grades. Results suggest that downloading course outlines partially mediates the relationship between goals and grades. Identifying how goals influence achievement through observable behaviors contributes to the theoretical understanding of achievement goals while also suggesting practical implications for instructors.
Educational Psychology Review, 2015
Robust knowledge serves as a common instructional target in academic settings. Past research iden... more Robust knowledge serves as a common instructional target in academic settings. Past research identifying characteristics of experts’ knowledge across many domains can help clarify the features of robust knowledge as well as ways of assessing it. We review the expertise literature and identify three key features of robust knowledge (deep, connected, and coherent) and four means of assessing these features (perception, memory, problem
solving, and transfer). Focusing on the domains of math and science learning, we examine how four instructional techniques—practice, worked examples, analogical comparison, and self-explanation—can promote key features of robust knowledge and how those features can
be assessed. We conclude by discussing the implications of this framework for theory and practice.
Learning & Instruction, 2013
A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amou... more A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We hypothesized that students would acquire more conceptual knowledge from withholding instructional explanations because they would be more likely to engage in constructive cognitive activities to understand the problem-solving steps, whereas providing instructional explanations might suppress such activities. Furthermore, we examined the roles of prior knowledge and student motivation in determining learning outcomes. Across three experiments, students in the withholding conditions showed greater conceptual learning than students in the providing conditions. Additionally, achievement goal orientations were more predictive of learning for the withholding conditions than the providing conditions. We discuss how the interactions between prior knowledge, motivation, and instruction can support learning and transfer.
Educational Psychology, 2014
This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and ... more This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their
motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science
lessons or a control condition that wrote summaries of those same lessons. Writing activities were 10 min long and were given approximately once a week for eighteen weeks. Student motivation was assessed via self-report surveys for achievement goals and interest in science before and after the intervention. Students in the experimental condition showed higher endorsement of mastery goals and reported greater situational interest in science topics after the intervention compared to students who summarised the lessons. Increases in situational interest predicted higher individual interest in the domain. Results indicate an instructional practice requiring just 3 hours out of a semester of instruction was sufficient to achieve these effects on motivation in science classes.