The Impact of Anomalous Information, Personality, and Motivation on Self- Regulatory Processes in a Multimedia Vicarious Learning Environment

Regulating one’s learning involves analyzing the learning context, setting and managing meaningful learning goals, determining which learning strategies to use, assessing whether the strategies are effective in meeting the learning goals, evaluating emerging understanding of the topic, and determining whether there are aspects of the learning context which could be used to facilitate learning. The focus of this paper is on one specific selfregulatory process: self-questioning. Self-questioning specifically refers to a self-regulatory process in which a leaner formulates a question, inquiry, or hypothesis about the material being studied. The current study was designed to assess the potential benefits of presenting anomalous information to the learner in order to produce a state of cognitive disequilibrium which in turn could potentially lead to an increase in the quantity and quality of questions. A significant difference in question asking quantity as a function of condition was discovered. Furthermore, certain individual differences were discovered to have an impact on who most benefited from the presentation of anomalous information.