Metacognition in understanding multimedia presentations

The symposium is aimed at highlighting the role that the awareness about the mental processes which are activated and the control over such processes play in comprehending and memorizing notions presented through texts and pictures. The attempt is to support the notion that promoting metacognition could improve the effectiveness of multimedia tools. In fact, metacognition should bring students to develop adequate strategies to learn from text-picture combinations. The contributions included in the symposium present a set of different ways of interpreting the links between metacognition and multimedia learning and show a series of experimental approaches that can be followed to investigate such links. This symposium is aimed at exploring relations between metacognition and multimedia learning. We focused particularly on the role that the awareness about the mental processes which are activated and the control over such processes play in comprehending and memorizing notions presented through texts and pictures. The symposium relies on the assumption that promoting a metacognitive attitude could improve the effectiveness of multimedia tools (Mayer, 2005). As Mayer (2001) pointed out, the different channels and structures through which information is presented can support meaningful learning, allowing many different strategies to be used in the access and handling of information. However, there is the risk that students underestimate the cognitive potential of multimedia tools. Successful outcomes in multimedia learning environments are hence dependent not only on the multimedia tools themselves but also on their ability to foster the development of the necessary metacognitive skills in order to promote deep information processing and enhance the acquisition of well-defined knowledge structures (Mayer, 1999). A metacognitive attitude could bring the student to develop a strong awareness towards the tool, the specific task, and the content he/she is learning, as well as adequate strategies and an effective self-regulation. The contributions included in the symposium address the above mentioned issues, so to present a set of different ways of interpreting the links between metacognition and multimedia learning and to show a series of experimental approaches that can be followed to investigate such links. The first paper explores how mental representations are actually built depending on the order of presentation of the multimedia stimuli. The second contribution investigates changes in students’ awareness of the strategies they followed in learning from static and dynamic multimedia presentations. The third paper analyzes how learners are accurate in predicting and assessing retrospectively their performance. The fourth contribution explores students’ awareness of the reasons which lead a student to integrate spontaneously verbal information with pictures and the strategies he/she applies to do so. The four papers focus on progressive levels of metacognition. In the first paper learners were given no explicit hint at inducing a metacognitive attitude. In the second paper explicit questions about the strategies activated were given after the task was carried out. In the third paper metacognitive questions concerned the outcome of the strategies and were given before performing the task. In the fourth paper metacognitive reflections about the relevance of the strategies were suggested during the task.