Educational Technology Research Summary

Dissertation Abstract: Research on software application training has been predominantly based on the premise that the user builds an internal functional model of the system. This view of cognition as purely internal has been challenged by studies showing that experts do not remember the exact commands required to complete a task if they are not in front of the computer. Display-based competence suggests that a flow of information takes place between the display and the user, who only holds the necessary information to understand the visual cues and act accordingly.

Distributed cognition, however, does not say anything about the perceptual and motor actions necessary to acquire the information from the world and act on it. Embodied cognition addresses this gap, suggesting that at the ‘embodiment level’ users will choose between cognitive, perceptual, and motor operators based on a cost-benefit analysis.

For the purpose of this study, a software simulator was built based on visual cues and salient task features displayed by the real software. Several additional resources were made available to help with task completion. This research showed that information access cost in online environments for software training has a clear impact on the strategies employed, the learning processes engaged, and learning outcomes. The idea of a dual-learning process taking place when users are learning interactive behaviors, i.e. command sequences, was also supported. In the specific case of educational games, information access cost and concurrent game tasks can trigger a non-attentional cue-based behavior that results in higher task efficiency and accuracy, but negatively impacts conceptual learning. An evidence-based design framework that maps instructional information resources, access costs, and forms of interactivity in digital environments to specific learning processes and objectives was constructed.