January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

“Opportunity Cost’” and “Demand’”) Specific Prompts “Do you want to reconsider the link of ‘Determine’
between ‘Opportunity Cost’ and ‘Demand’ you teach me and give me an
Missing Expert Propositions
(e.g. Missing proposition between
“Income’” and “Demand’”)
Methodology
Research Questions and Hypotheses
explanation?”
Generic Prompts: “Can you review all things done to make sure nothing
is missing and give me an explanation?”
Specific Prompts: “Do you consider teach the link between ‘Income’ and
‘Demand’ and give me an explanation?”
Our research questions focused on whether the systematic use of the agent prompts would be relevant to (a) the
acquisition of learning outcomes and (b) the elicited levels of reflection.
The two research questions are as follows:
1. Do agent prompts have cognitive and metacognitive effects on secondary school participants’ learning outcomes
in the domain of elementary economics within the learning-by-teaching environment?
2. Do agent prompts presented in different types (generic prompts vs. specific prompts) elicit different levels of
reflection in their learning-by-teaching processes?
Based on the two research questions, we formulated the following hypothesis based on the assumption that doubleloop
learning is a higher level of learning than single-loop learning (e.g. Courtney et al., 1998).
Hypothesis 1 (Learning Outcomes): The GP (Generic Prompts) group will achieve better learning outcomes than the
SP (Specific Prompts) and the NP (No Prompts) groups, and the SP group will achieve better learning outcomes than
the NP group. This hypothesis is It will be measured in three areas.
Hypothesis 1.1 (Pretest/Posttest Gain): The GP group will show greater improvements from pretest to posttest than
the SP and NP groups, and the SP group will show greater improvements from pretest to posttest than the NP group.
Hypothesis 1.2 (Quality of Student Maps): In the main study, the GP group will develop better student maps than
the SP and NP groups, and the SP group will develop better student maps than the NP group.
Hypothesis 1.3 (Ability to Transfer): In the transfer test, the GP group will develop better student maps than the SP
and NP groups, and the SP group will develop better student maps than the NP group.
Hypothesis 2 (Levels of Reflection): The GP group will show higher levels of reflection than SP group.
Participants and Procedures
Participants were 33 students from two local secondary schools (ages ranged from 13 to 15) who took part in the
experiments on a voluntary basis for two two-hour sessions within one week: main study and transfer study. They
were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions. Eventually, 29 students (76%), 20 female (69%) and 9 male
(31%) completed all the activities, resulting in the following division over the three conditions: no prompts (NP)
condition as control group: n = 10, specific prompts (SP) condition: n = 10 and generic prompts (GP) condition: n =
9.
The domain in the main study was the elementary economics topics of demand and supply. Economics is both a
theoretical and applied domain, seldom studied in class by secondary school students and seldom adopted as the
domain in ILE research (e.g. Nichols, 1993). The domain materials were provided to participants before the sessions.
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