In this Master thesis, we research the influence of Mayer's principles of multimedia material on the use of students' cognitive skills, specifically techniques for solving problems, metacognitive skills and their motivation. We want to determine if multimedia material which will affect students in a way that it will encourage the development of their studying self-regulation, computational and algorithmic thinking and their learning motivation can be created.
Many teachers familiar with the motivational effect of multimedia material on students are perhaps not aware of the influence such material has on cognitive and metacognitive skills and how that reflects in student's thinking process. Research shows that teachers should be very careful when adding interesting details and various motivational elements to multimedia material because they can risk the student's cognitive overload. With the purpose of raising awareness of such problems, we describe Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning in the first theoretical part of this thesis, where we also focus on the meaning of interactivity in multimedia material. In computer science teaching, where computational and algorithmic thinking are important for beginner's programming, one of the first obstacles we face is preparing students for abstract thinking. We describe the meaning of computational thinking and suggested activities for more pleasant and fun lessons and easier learning of abstract thinking. On the other hand, we should also be aware of the student's cognitive development so that we can adjust more difficult topics to the level of the student's understanding. With this purpose, we describe Piaget's and Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development. We also talk about the process of self-regulation and the process of solving problems, which represent an important tool for learningalgorithms. At the end of theoretical part, we also review the literature describing the influence of multimedia on students' feelings and motivation.
We conduct an empirical research where we analyse the influence of multimedia material made on the basis of Mayer's principles on students' acquired knowledge, cognitive and metacognitive skills and their motivation. As a sample, we used 4th grade elementary school students aged from 9 to 10. We find statistically significant differences in knowledge gained between experimental and control groups and we also find out that students in experimental group identified algorithmic errors better than students in control group. We also find statistically significant differences in the use of cognitive skills and motivation, where it shows that students in experimental group use cognitive skills more intensively and are more motivated. It turns out that when it comes to the use of cognitive skills, multimedia material has the most positive effect on visual students, while auditory students were the most motivated. When looking for correlations, in experimental group we find strong connection between metacognitive skills and motivation and a marginal negative correlation between metacognitive and cognitive skills. In the last part of our empirical research we explore students' opinion about the factors present in the multimedia material. We find out that the colour and format of the material, the way it is presented, having control over what and in which order to view it and the intelligibility and clarity of the explanation are assessed considerably better in experimental group.
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