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Multimedia resources designed to support learning from written proofs: An eye-movement study
journal contribution
posted on 2017-03-03, 11:29 authored by S. Roy, Matthew InglisMatthew Inglis, Lara AlcockLara AlcockThis paper presents two studies of an intervention designed to help undergraduates comprehend mathematical proofs. The intervention used multimedia resources that presented proofs with audio commentary and visual animations designed to focus attention on logical relationships. In Study 1, students studied an e-Proof or a standard written proof and their comprehension was assessed in both immediate and delayed tests; the groups performed similarly at immediate test, but the e-Proof group exhibited poorer
retention. Study 2 accounted for this unexpected result by using eye-movement
analyses to demonstrate that participants who studied an e-Proof exhibited less processing effort when not listening to the audio commentary. We suggest that the extra support offered by e-Proofs disrupts the processes by which students organise information, and thus restricts the extent to which their new understanding is integrated with existing knowledge. We discuss the implications of these results for evaluating teaching innovations and for supporting proof comprehension.
Funding
This work was partially funded by a grant from the Mathematics, Statistics, and Operational Research Network of the Higher Education Academy (to LA and MI) and a Royal Society Worshipful Company of Actuaries Research Fellowship (to MI).
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematics Education Centre
Published in
Educational Studies in MathematicsCitation
ROY, S., INGLIS, M. and ALCOCK, L., 2017. Multimedia resources designed to support learning from written proofs: An eye-movement study. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 96(2), pp.249-266.Publisher
Springer / © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution(CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-02-09Publication date
2017Notes
This is an open access article published by Springer and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
0013-1954eISSN
1573-0816Publisher version
Language
- en
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