Do Multiple Representations Need Explanations? The Role of Verbal Guidance and Individual Differences in Multimedia Mathematics Learning.

Elementary school children, some of whom were nonnative speakers of English, learned to add and subtract integers in a discovery-based multimedia game either with or without verbal guidance in English or optionally in Spanish (Groups G—verbal guidance and No-G—no verbal guidance, respectively). Group G members chose to listen to verbal explanations in their first language and showed larger posttest scores than Group No-G. High-computer-experience students in Group G outperformed the rest of the students on training session scores and a transfer test. Longer latencies to respond to practice problems affected all learning measures positively. Results support the use of verbal guidance for discovery-based multimedia games and show that multimedia games may not be equally effective for all learners. What is the role of verbal guidance in promoting mathematics learning from a discovery-based multimedia game? Are there important individual differences for which a multimedia game helps some kinds of learners more than others? These are impor-tant questions both for research and for the application of research, to improve instruction and learning outcomes in learning mathe-matics with multimedia programs. Our first question is concerned