Conditions That Trigger Flow In Learning Activities

Flow is a state in which an individual is completely immersed in an activity without reflective self-consciousness but with a deep sense of control.When individual experience flow in learning activities,he will concentrate on learning materials,devoted cognitive resources for information processing,meantime feel time passed really fast.More importantly,once individual was involved in flow state during learning activities,the optimal experience would motivate him to engage in learning activities again and again,leading to more practice and improved performance.Thus,it would be beneficial that students experience flow in learning activities.However,most researchers adopting educational games to provoke flow experience,the integration of game element and learning materials.In fact,educational game usually depends on its funny design to provoke flow experience instead of manipulating challenges of learning materials.Furthermore,with so much game elements in educational games,it is hard to maintain the balance of subject matter and game play,resulting in game flow and extraneous motivation towards learning ultimately.Thus,current research was about to formed a new instructional design to provoke flow experience based on cognitive load theory,exploring the effects of cognitive load and perceived learning performance on flow,providing the neural correlates of flow adopting Event-Related Potentials.The research contained two parts: one was to investigate the effects of cognitive load on flow experience based on college students and senior high school students;one was to conclude the preconditions of flow experience in learning activities.The first part included three experiments.Pre-experiment was about to test the learning materials and select appropriate ones based on the results.Experiment1 manipulated both intrinsic cognitive load and extraneous cognitive load to investigate flow experience based on college students.The results showed that,(1)intrinsic cognitive load had firm main effect on flow experience.The more intrinsic cognitive load,the lower the degree of flow experience was.(2)extraneous cognitive load only showed a slightly main effect on flow experience in low expertise groups.The more extraneous cognitive load,the lower degree of flow experience was.Experiment 2 was intended to validate the effect of cognitive load on flow experience based on senior high school students.The results showed that(1)The more intrinsic cognitive load,the lower the degree of flow experience was;The more extraneous cognitive load,the higher degree of flow experience.(2)for senior high school students,the way that extraneous cognitive load impacted flow was inconsistent with that of college school students.The reason behind it may be perceived performance.The second one included two experiments: Pre-experiment was about to test the difficulty of five groups of English words with Chinese meaning.Experiment 1 manipulated intrinsic cognitive load to investigate the optimal cognitive load for flow experience of college students adopting Event-related potentials.The results indicated that(1)On the behavior level,low task demand with a high accuracy gave rise to highest flow.(2)On the neural level,a larger LPC of low task demand condition in learning session represented semantic integration which could be seen as the preconditions of perceived good performance.(3)A smaller P3 of low task demand condition in recognizing session reflected the allocation of attentional resources which was identified to be related to the occurrence of flow experience.In conclusion,the research adopted a new instructional design based on cognitive load theory and examined the effect of cognitive load on flow,meanwhile found the optimal intrinsic cognitive load for flow experience adopting event-related potentials.The research found,intrinsic cognitive load had a stable and consistent effect on flow experience;low intrinsic cognitive load was optimal for flow experience;the neural correlates of flow using ERPS was a larger LPC in learning session and a smaller P3 in recognizing session.