Synonyms
Definition
The number of non-automatic elaborations applied to a unit of material to be learned (Salomon 1984, p. 648).
Theoretical Background
What Mental Effort Is
Mental effort was first used as a concept to help determine how hard a person tries to actively process presented information. It was seen as a combination of perceived demand characteristics, perceived self-efficacy, and level/depth of information processing such that the first two influence the last which determines the amount of invested mental effort. Perceived demand characteristics depend upon the degree to which a source (e.g., a stimulus, task, context) that is being attended to poses demands on ones’s processing, because information has to be extracted, discriminated among, remembered, and elaborated upon (Salomon 1984). Research has shown that if the source is seen by a person as being complex (e.g., if a person is a complete novice) and/or if the learner...
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Kirschner, P.A., Kirschner, F. (2012). Mental Effort. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_226
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_226
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