Effect of presentation style and problem-solving attempts on metacognition and learning from solution videos

Abstract

Students must actively engage in problem solving to effectively learn in introductory physics courses. However, students often get stuck and are not able to make progress when solving problems outside of their current ability, particularly when one-on-one tutoring and instructor office hours are a limited resource. One effective technique consists of providing students with worked examples during the problem-solving process. While the benefits of worked examples are well established, less is known about how the format of the worked example affects student learning, or the effect of solution videos on student metacognition. This study presents three experiments investigating how the format of animated worked examples affects student learning and metacognition. The results indicate that students learn equally well from different styles of solution videos that follow multimedia learning principles. In addition, attempting to solve problems before viewing the solution videos facilitates learning for problems just outside a student's current ability, but not for more difficult problems. Further, attempting to solve very difficult problems before viewing animated solution videos can potentially lead to overconfidence, where students believe that they learned more from the solutions than they have actually learned.