External Support

According to the previous studies (Alesandrini, 1981; Van Meter, 2001; Van Meter et al., 2006; Van Meter & Garner, 2005), evidences have shown that LGD

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assists students to deepen their comprehension of the presented text and will built constructive mental model; however, this strategy is not always beneficial unless providing external supports. LGD could be used as a “pure” or “with support”. A pure LGD refers to that students receive a text purely directing students to draw; whereas the supported LGD refers to those students receive extensive aids (such as teacher provided illustration or prompting questions) after drawing. Previous experiments of LGD separated the external supports (feedback after drawing) into illustration only and illustrations with prompting questions.

Van meter (2001) and her series of studies have proved that learners who had received external supports engaged in more self-monitoring events and they tended to detect and correct more comprehension errors than those who received no external supports (Van Meter, 2001). Moreover, researchers (Alesandrini, 1981; Lesgold et al., 1975; Van Meter, 2001; Van Meter et al., 2006) suggest that there are three functions of external supports:

(1) To constrain the construction of drawing (direct attention to differentiate the relevant from the irrelevant); thus, learners would not be deviated from the text.

(2) To guide the students selecting and focusing on key elements and relations among the text contents.

(3) To prompt checking and correcting learner’s drawing (monitoring and regulation).

By comparing the learner’s generative drawing and the prompting illustrations, students could detect their misunderstandings and make adequate correction, which increases the accuracy of students’ mental model.

Most of the studies (Butcher, 2006) claimed that external supports have benefits on students learning while using the drawing strategy. For example, serial studies of Lesgold et al (Lesgold et al., 1975) found that construction process plus handout of accurately organizing figures and background knowledge produced significant

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benefits. Alesandrini (Alesandrini, 1981, 1984) emphasized that learners required additional instructions and supports to attend to how each structure fits into the complete system. Only generative drawing is not enough for learners. When a student is able to compare the structural and functional resemblances between the external supports and ones’ own drawing that would be a very important feedback about the complete schematic concepts, the alternative concepts that one may have acquired and the conflicts between the schematic concepts and the alternative concepts. This feedback if received by highly motivated students would help modify his/her mental model to show higher accurate scientific knowledge. Van Meter (Van Meter, 2001;

Van Meter et al., 2006; Van Meter & Garner, 2005) has showed that in the group received external supports, students demonstrated higher accuracy and gain more knowledge. In this series of research, treatment were assigned into four levels,

Mayer (1984) suggests three types of supports, which is, supports having various cognitive functions. The study divided the supports into (1) selecting supports, (2) building internal connections supports and (3) building external connections supports.

Selecting supports focus on the target information and serve to the learners certain aspects. By giving the selecting supports, the learner would construct the facts propositional representation of the information. The building internal supports foster the learners to organize the information into the structures. Building external connections supports are designed to help the reader build connections between the

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ideas in the text and an existing mental model, thus integrating these new ideas into leaner’s existing priori mental model (Mayer, 1984; Resnick, 1982). These aids support the construction and extension of the mental model based on the propositional representations.

In many related studies (Schwamborn et al., 2010; Van Meter, 2001), researchers offered two levels of supported sources to ensure if the level of aiding could influence the outcome. In the same line, I differentiate external supports into three levels that would be compared with the pure drawing (LGD) group to examine what kind of components are required for LGD to be effective. This study claimed that external supports should be used with the most accurate visualization feedback that would the static features and dynamic functional purpose. There will be four treatment groups in this study.

(1) Pure drawing or LGD group (D).

(2) Drawing with “Illustration feedback” group (DI): After students’ active drawing, the experimenter offers hand–drawing figure with keywords of organs and organization of the human circulatory system which assumed to be capable of providing embedded cognitive supports of “selecting main points” and “internal supports to present a visualization that integrates main concepts.”

(3) Drawing with “illustration feedback and prompting question” group (DIP): After active drawing, students are given illustration embedded with directional-spatial cues and text-questions asking for allocating attention to main points (functional and directional information) in the illustration and meta-cognitive refection.

(4) Drawing with “illustration feedback, prompting questions and explicit instruction”

group (DIPE): The experimenter explicitly presents all the cognitive supports described above and encourage students to actively practice drawing under teacher guidance”

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However, “Prompting questions” are more like the combination of the selecting, internal and external aids. I expected that the group with “Prompting question” would perform better than “Illustration”. Accordingly, the second hypothesis is that when a learner is provided with external supports of illustration feedback, the effect would be mainly on the performance of post factual retention test but the effect on transfer test and post mental model would be limited. But when it comes to the third hypothesis, that learner were given the prompting questions, (s)he would demonstrate more accurate and constructive drawing outcome and deeper comprehension than the one who does not obtain external support. For some students who are not good at drawing, have lower visualization capacity, or are more skillful in use of other strategy other than drawing who may need explicit instruction about why and how to do draw.

External supports in this study will be differentiated as “illustration feedback”,

“prompting questions in addition to illustration” and also given “instruction” before LGD. According to the pilot study and the observation in class experience, I believe that students in Taiwan had less chance to conduct drawing activity and lack of interest. By instruction, students could not only be explicitly introduced to how to select, organize and integrate main points in to a visualization representation, but also given chances to practice. I expect this explicit instruction could build up confidence of the participants which may enhance students’ active engagement. That is, the fourth hypothesis, receiving instruction would benefit on the learners’ understanding revealed from all three post-tests. Additionally, through the instruction, learner could perform the best among other groups.

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