History learning with textual or visual tasks: student dialogue

Multimodal representations are representations containing a combination of text and schemas and/or pictures. According to the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning such representations can be powerful learning tools. The study described here approaches this theory from the domain of history in co-construction tasks. In an experimental study, the dialogues of pupils who co-constructed either textual representations or multimodal representations integrated in a timeline were compared. The participants were 12 to 14-year-old pupils in pre-vocational secondary education who worked in dyads on a series of four history tasks. Dialogue protocols of the taped student conversations for one of these tasks were analysed. The results show that integrated multimodal representations do - to some extent - lead to more discussion about domain content as well as about procedural issues than working with textual representations.

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