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Article Excerpt
This article reviews recent empirical investigations of imagination or mental practice in highly cognitive, realistic educational domains such as mathematics or learning computer applications. While mental practice has been a standard tool in training schedules devised by sports psychologists for several decades, with its efficacy studied experimentally in a multitude of sports, there has been little corresponding research in the education or training research literature. Recent research has demonstrated that mental practice can be incorporated effectively when learning non-motor, complex cognitive skills. Experimental studies are reviewed showing 'imagining' worked examples, paired with practice questions, enhances learning for more experienced learners, but study activities are more appropriate for students less experienced in a given domain. Interactions of the imagination effect with cognitive load effects are also discussed. Possible directions for mental practice research in education are proposed.
Introduction
Imagery, visualisation and mental practice are terms for a class of cognitive processes which may enhance learning under certain circumstances. They involve quasi-sensory conscious experiences, or as Anderson (1981, p. 150) notes, 'they have in common the awareness of sensory qualities in the absence of appropriate external stimuli'. He goes on to note that while the term 'imagery' has a visual connotation, it need not be restricted to this modality, and recommends using the term 'imaginary' over 'imaginal' to reduce the visual connotation when discussing such phenomena. The mnemonic use of such processes is ancient, in particular, the Method of Loci ascribed to Simonides the orator (Yates, 1966). Imaginary processes have provided the basis for several more recently developed and empirically validated mnemonics, such as the keyword method (Atkinson, 1975) and the face-name method (Carney & Levin, 2000).
Whereas the focus of the above-mentioned mnemonics has traditionally been learning of declarative information (e.g., facts, vocabulary), the term 'mental practice' has traditionally been used in the context of developing procedural knowledge, such as physical or cognitive skills. Considerable evidence exists that mental practice, '... the symbolic, covert, mental rehearsal of a task in the absence of actual, overt, physical movement' (Driskell, Copper, & Moran, 1994, p. 481), assists learning a broad range of motor, perceptuo-motor, and cognitive skills. Synonyms used by researchers for 'mental practice' have included 'symbolic rehearsal' (Sackett, 1934; 1935), 'imaginary practice' (Perry, 1939), 'covert rehearsal' (Corbin, 1967; Peynircioglu, 1995), and 'mental rehearsal' (Dunbar, 2000; Rawlings & Rawlings, 1974).
Mental practice may be related to other instructional effects besides imagery and visualisation. Cooper, Tindall-Ford, Chandler, and Sweller (2001) note that the processes underlying effective mental practice may be similar to those underlying effective self-explanation (e.g., Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989; Wong, Lawson, & Keeves, 2002). The latter body of research has found effective problem solvers are more likely to explain to themselves the relations between elements in to-be-learned material (e.g., parts of a worked example). One form of self-explanation identified by Renkl (1997), anticipative reasoning, occurs when a learner--typically with a relatively high level of prior knowledge--anticipates upcoming steps in a worked example (e.g., the next intermediate step in a multi-step probability calculation) in their mind, rather than simply studying the solution. Cooper et al. (2001, p. 80) argue this process can be considered 'a natural form of mental practice'.
Mental practice has been widely studied and advocated by sports psychologists as a means of enhancing performance at both an amateur and professional level, and many top sportspeople use the technique, often in conjunction with other sports psychology techniques like biofeedback and relaxation (Murphy & Jowdy, 1992). Evaluations of mental practice with complex instructional materials, particularly of major elements in school, higher education, or organisational training curricula, are currently in the minority of published mental practice studies. The overall goal of this article will be to highlight ways in which mental practice can be incorporated effectively into learning programs. A brief overview of the history of mental practice research is given, including the most recent meta-analysis of the research literature. More recent studies, which investigate mental practice of worked examples in realistic educational domains, will then be discussed. Opportunities for further research into both the design and application of mental practice activities are also suggested.
Empirical investigations of mental practice
Empirical studies of mental practice date from the 1930s. Initial experiments involving mental practice investigated its effect on tasks with a high cognitive component. Sackett (1934, 1935) investigated the effect of what he called 'symbolic rehearsal' on the retention of a 'maze habit', while Perry (1939) investigated whether 'imaginary practice' affected performance on a tapping task, a card-sorting task, a peg board task, a symbol digit substitution task, and a mirror tracing task. Relatively little research was carried out on mental practice in the 1940s and 1950s, but with the advent of sports psychology in the 1960s and 1970s interest in its application to sporting performance increased considerably. However, the voluminous body of research that resulted from this rediscovery was marked by considerable theoretical debate as to the precise nature of mental practice effects. Initial reviews of the mental practice research literature were contradictory. Richardson (1967) concluded that mental practice was associated with improved motor performance in the majority of studies reviewed, whereas Corbin (1972) argued that the situation was not so clear-cut as Richardson had proposed, with individual, task and methodological factors all moderating the impact of mental practice on performance. More recently, the development of meta-analysis (Glass, 1976) has provided a quantitative method...
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