Promoting Self-Regulation with a Multitouch Experiment Instruction on the topic of water analysis

In context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the range of experiments offered by the Schülerlabor NanoBioLab at Saarland University was expanded to include an experiment on the topic of water analysis, which provided the basis of the intervention. In addition to the analogue experiment instruction, there is a digital version which is presented as a Multitouch Experiment Instruction (MEI). MEIs are digitally enriched, interactive experiment instructions that accompany the cognitive learning process of pupils and promote competencies in the digital world (Seibert et al., 2020). In this study, we analysed whether the MEI could support self-regulated learning in an indirect support approach by considering different hierarchical levels of self-regulation in the design of the materials. The results show a significant acquisition of self-regulatory competences of learners in grades ten and eleven by using the MEI compared to the analogue version.