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Author and Title
Sharon Oviatt, Alex Arthur, and Julia Cohen.Quiet Interfaces That Help Students Think.

Abstract
As technical as we have become, modern computing still has not permeated many important areas of our lives, in-cluding mathematics education which still involves pencil and paper. In the present study, twenty high school geometry students varying in ability from low to high participated in a comparative assessment of math problem solving behavior using existing pencil and paper work practice (PP), and three different interfaces: a digital stylus and paper interface (DP), pen tablet interface (PT), and graphical tab-let interface (GT). Cognitive Load Theory correctly pre-dicted that as interfaces departed more from familiar work practice (GT > PT > DP), students would experience greater cognitive load such that performance would dete-riorate in speed, attentional focus, meta-cognitive control, correctness of problem solutions, and memory. In addition, low-performing students were expected to experience elevated cognitive load, with the most challenging interfaces disrupting their performance disproportionately more than for high-performing students. The present results indicate that Cognitive Load Theory provides a coherent and pow-erful basis for predicting users’ performance. In the future, new interfaces for areas like education and mobile computing could benefit by being designed to minimize users’ cognitive load so their performance can be adequately supported.

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