The Effect Of Increasing Germane Cognitive Load In Multimedia Learning To Students' Learning

Cognitive load theory is developing rapidly in recent years out of China, while many psychologists focused on the management of cognitive load in multimedia learning. The known researches paid much attention to reducing extraneous cognitive load and intrinsic cognitive load while few to the management of germane cognitive load. Present study was based on cognitive load theory and known researches, investigated the effect of increasing germane cognitive load to students' learning, and also put meta-cognitive load into experimental research.There are two experiments in present study with the materials on how mobile communications work, which were presented by multimedia. Participants were sophomores and juniors from Department of Optics and Electronics in Tianjin University of Technology. In experiment Ⅰ, we increased learner's germane cognitive load by asking them write down the summary of each page, then compared if there were differences between groups with and without summary. At the same time, we compared the cognitive load and achievement of participants with and without background music. In experiment Ⅱ, we investigated the effect of meta-cognition on learner's cognitive load and achievement.In experiment Ⅰ we employed a between-group design, i.e., 2(factor 1: summary, including with summary and without summary)×2(factor 2: i.e., background music, including with background music and without background music). In experiment Ⅱ, there were three groups and participants learn the materials twice. Group 1 got meta-cognition before the first presentation, while group 2 got before the second presentation, and group 3 had no meta-cognition. We got the following conclusion.