Age differences in search during self-regulated learning

While search is increasingly becoming a more central process in learning with the rise of electronic environments, little is known about how learners determine the points at which decide to move from one text to another. The current study aimed at examining how learners studying a domain in a multitext environment regulate their effort among multiple sources. Specifically, the goal was to understand the principles governing when learners discontinue reading about one topic to explore another in that domain. By manipulating the amount of new information and conceptual overlap across texts within a topic, we created three types of text environments to generate different trajectories of two cues to perceived learning, new information (measured by rating of perceived new information) and encoding fluency (measured by ratings of reading ease). We report a series of five studies (in Mechanical Turk and the lab; N=180), showing that learners leave one topic for another when perceived learning decreases. The dominant cue to gauge perceived learning was the perceived amount of new information, while encoding fluency became more important when the study time was limited or among the older adults with poorer verbal ability. Interestingly, older adults were able to take differential advantages of conceptual overlap across texts for learning the text in which was high in the amount of new information. The study extended theories in animal foraging and metacognition, and established a novel paradigm to better investigate adult learning in the wild.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Chin, Jessie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Stine-Morrow, Elizabeth A. L.
• Morrow, Daniel G.
• Fu, Wai-Tat
• Payne, Stephen
• Mata, Rui

• search
• information foraging
• metacognition
• learning
• self-regulation
• foraging
• cognitive aging
• self-regulated learning
• comprehension
• metacomprehension
• text prediction
• stopping rules
• stopping decisions
• encoding fluency

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Jessie Chin

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90705

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/90705