Research suggests that explanatory pictures support learning, whereas pictures that distract processing resources from the main ideas of a text may impair learning and are considered as seductive illustrations. However, non-explanatory pictures that are related to the text and that do not tempt readers to focus illustrations more than the text's…

Educative curricula support teacher learning as well as the learning of students. High quality educative curricula contain features that help teachers customize learning opportunities and environments in ways that meet the needs of their learners. Designing these features requires expertise related to subject matter content, pedagogy, teacher and…

Transdisciplinary learning environments have potential to bring together the arts, sciences, and computing within schools. We investigate the student and teacher enactment of sensemaking practices that break down disciplinary silos. We describe a pedagogical approach, Luminous Science, where students make dynamic, computationally-rich artistic…

Instructional design deals with the optimization of learning processes. To achieve this, three aspects need to be considered: (1) the learning task itself, (2) the design of the learning material, and (3) the activation of the learner's cognitive processes during learning. Based on Cognitive Load Theory, learners also need to deal with the task…

We compared performances on a learning task in which students (N = 81) viewed a pedagogical multimedia document without (control group) or with a readymade graphic organizer (readymade group) with performances on an active learning task where students self-generated a graphic organizer either totally (total self-generated group) or partially…

Designing learning environments with "distributed scaffolding"--support distributed across different instructional tools, activities, and the teacher--can help support students' different needs, but a critical question is how the design incorporates the hallmark feature of responsive support. While most material scaffolds in…

Research has shown that retrieval activities, that is, actively recalling previously studied information, may substantially contribute to learning from complex educational materials, sometimes more so than other more popular techniques such as rereading and elaborative study. In this context, recent studies (Blunt and Karpicke, J Educ Psychol…