The facilitation of self-regulation can be a way to deal with heterogeneity in class. The
teacher does not have to supervise the students at every step of their learning processes,
but delegates responsibility of the learning progress to each student (vom Hofe 2011).
The ability to manage one’s own learning activities is an important competency going
far beyond the learning in school. With that presumption the construction of learning
environments is a crucial point for successful self-regulated learning at school.
CONCEPTUAL FOCUS & RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This paper compares two ways of dealing with interactive and animated
worked-out-examples as instructional materials in self-regulated learning environments:
self-explanation training and self-explanation prompts.
To get data as ecological as possible the study was integrated into the regular fractions
course of a middle school. Because there are many studies with high school and university
students, the chosen students were between 12 and 14 years old. The qualitative
data were not collected with the think-aloud-method because that would have been a
major interference in the usual behaviour of the students.
To minimize expertise-reversal effects and to give the students the chance to choose
the materials they want to work with, the intervention phase was designed as an
individual learning environment that delegates lots of decisions concerning the learning
activities to the students.
Negotiation processes between peers play an important role during learning processes.
To take account of this component the students were grouped in pairs. This is an
alternative way to get valid qualitative data instead of using think-aloud- procedures
that would disturb the class-routine.
The paper focuses on spontaneous mathematical reasoning processes and occurring
self-explanations, thus every computer was equipped with a webcam to record the
students’ activities and dialogues. To control prior knowledge a pre-test was carried
out. A parallel-constructed post-test was conducted to get an impression of the
knowledge about fractions after the intervention,
The following research questions were of special interest:
• To what extent does working with animated worked-out examples foster
mathematical argumentation and reasoning activities?
• What kind of spontaneous dialogues and mathematical reasoning-activities can
be observed?
• How do the different ways to elicit self-explanations affect the processing of the
worked-out examples?
METHOD
Subjects
The subjects were 85 students at the age of 12 to 14 from three sixth-grade-classes of a
German secondary school (Realschule). The prior domain knowledge of the
participants was supposed to be very small because there is no systematic course
dealing with fractions before the sixth grade in primary or secondary schools.