Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe current study examined the impacts of concreteness fading and explanation activity on learning from visualizations of real-world physics experiments. Results indicated that concreteness fading may make the relationships between concrete and symbolic representation elements more salient, yielding improvements in representation integration and in the quality of students' scientific explanations. However, it did not improve the accuracy or depth of students' comprehension of domain principles. Meanwhile, encouraging more active explanation activities during learning did not provide students with observable learning benefits in the current research. Compared to building or selecting explanations during learning, viewing provided explanations was equally effective for learning and was the only explanation activity that did not show a decrease in domain enjoyment following the intervention