· Blog Post 1: Explain the e-learning principles your lesson includes and how they promote critical thinking skills.
Clark and Mayer (2008) describe critical thinking as the “evaluation of products and ideas” (p.342). Although many of the e-learning principles were considered and applied to this lesson, the principles within the storyboard that most effectively promote critical thinking skills are:
- Personalization – Presenting information in an informal, conversational style cognitively prepares the learner to engage with the material being delivered.
- Pretraining – Teaching some of the key concepts and facts early in the lesson helps learners new to the self-regulation theories reduce the amount of cognitive processing needed to make sense of the ideas.
- Segmentation – Breaking the lesson into small portions helps novice learners understand and retain the information for longer periods of time by avoiding cognitive overload. Understanding the content more deeply provides them with more opportunities to analyze the content and make connections to the different applications.
- Worked examples – Providing students with an example of how to identify and remedy self-regulation issues within the classroom visually demonstrates correct actions and a template to follow for future situations.
- The modality principle – Including narration as opposed to text helps the learners to make meaningful connections between the content, examples provided, and real life experiences.
All of the preceding methods work together to reduce the amount of cognitive processes necessary to understand the theories of self regulation and how to apply them to their own classes. When students are not straining their resources to comprehend the lesson they have more chances to practice the concepts and critically analyze the effectiveness of their efforts. Therefore, each of the e-learning principles allow the instructor to progress the learning from basic understanding to higher order thought processing that involves manipulation of the ideas and applications.
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2008). E-learning and the science of instruction, 2nd edition. Pfeiffer: San Francisco, CA.
