Advisor

• Dr. Min Liu

Degree

• Doctoral

Abstract

Reformers have long urged educators to make schooling relevant to students through emphasis on learning through experience and provide connections to the world outside of the school walls. Hypermedia-supported authentic learning environments (HALE) seek to attain these goals by providing a rich context for students to engage in authentic tasks such as problem solving. This study examines whether expert stories can support student learning in a computer-based authentic learning environment. The participants in the study were students enrolled in sixth grade science at a suburban middle school located in the southwestern part of the United States. Two intact classes (N = 29, N = 30) participated in which 66.1% identified themselves as white, 18.6% as Hispanic American, 13.6% as African American, and 1.7% as Asian American. Two versions of the learning environment were used corresponding to the two treatment conditions: stories and non-stories. All versions of the program contained the same content and tools differing only in the implementation of the information in the expert tool. The stories version contained support which was in the format of short narratives from an expert. The non-stories version provided the same information, expect the support was presented as simple factual information. Measures of factual knowledge recall, near and far transfer, attitude toward science, and attitude toward the learning environment were administered. In addition, students' epistemological beliefs were measured to determine if they are effective predictors of academic performance in HALEs. On the measure of factual knowledge recall, no significant difference was found between the story and non-story conditions. Likewise, no significant differences were found between the story and non-story conditions on measures of attitude toward science and attitude toward the learning environment. The measure of students' epistemological beliefs was found to not be a significant predictor of student performance. However, when asked to solve near transfer and far transfer problems, students in the story treatment did significantly better than students in the non-story condition. This finding suggests that expert stories can scaffold student learning In particular, it appears that expert stories may help students transfer learning to novel situations.