Welche Rolle spielen kognitive Belastung und Motivation beim feedbackgestützten Lernen?

Students show difficulties in planning scientific experiments using the control-of-variable-strategy (CVS). Individual feedback supports students in applying the CVS. For feedback to be effective for learning, knowledge about the design and content and the influence on the effect is necessary. Meta-analyses and intervention studies have analyzed characteristics in terms of design and content and demonstrated their impact on knowledge and skills when using the CVS. Whether certain feedback features can also influence cognitive load, motivation, and perceived competence support and thus additionally promote the effect remains to be seen. Against this background, the experimental study presented in this article aims to investigate the design and content of feedback features and the influence of feedback on the cognitive load, motivation, and perceived competence support of students. For this purpose, three intervention groups worked each with a different version of feedback—factual, motivational, or graphic feedback—in chemistry lessons at lower secondary schools (N = 98). The results of the investigation show that supportive feedback characteristics can be categorized into design and content characteristics, which describe the formal criteria and the type of feedback information provided. The design characteristics include, for example, the scope of feedback and an apparent reference to the task being worked on. The feedback information on the learning objective, learning status, and the next steps can be assigned to the content characteristics. Using these characteristics in feedback increases the support during learning. Furthermore, these design and content characteristics of feedback significantly influence students’ cognitive load, motivation, and competence support when planning experiments using the CVS. However, the design focus of the three forms of feedback does not lead to perceptibly different forms, as the feedback itself does not influence the cognitive load, motivation, and competence support of students, and the concretized characteristics can be used to generate feedback in the future that helps students to plan experiments using the CVS even better.